3 Areas Where the ACA Ruling Will Accelerate Technology Innovation

3 key areas where the recent Supreme Court ACA ruling will spur technology innovation in the healthcare industry

Last week, the Supreme Court upheld the ACA (Affordable Care Act’s) individual mandate ruling it constitutional as a tax or penalty. The mandate would require everyone to have health insurance beginning in 2014 forever changing the way the country views healthcare. With this announcement, we can now move forward with the modernization of healthcare delivery through technology innovation.I think it is important to look at some areas where the ruling will help accelerate technology innovation in the healthcare industry. Here are three areas where the recent ACA ruling will help accelerate technology innovation:

1. Telemedicine/Remote Patient Monitoring: The ruling protects the previous investments in telemedicine made by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) making the funding status unaffected. The CMMI and several healthcare organizations across country have invested heavily in telemedicine pilot and other remote healthcare services. Also, the ruling does not affect any provisions for managed and accountable care, medical homes, and care coordination where telemedicine can provide quality, cost effective healthcare services. Over time, healthcare organizations will continue to increase the adoption of telemedicine/remote patient monitoring projects increasing quality of care and patient satisfaction.
2. Big Data: Consumers will increasingly demand for access to their health information making big data “ analytics” a vital area as the consumer becomes increasingly more proactive approach to managing their own healthcare. Innovation in analytics provides immense value across the entire healthcare ecosystem allowing healthcare organizations to analyze and leverage clinical, financial, claims, bio-medical, and public health information. Some of the key challenges that will spur innovation in analytics is being able to effectively decipher this information and building the appropriate infrastructure to support this.
3. mHealth: The ruling will bring millions of new insured participants into the healthcare system that will cause a increased demand due to the shortage of providers. As the healthcare systems moves away from a fee for service  model and more towards an outcomes based reimbursement model, this will  increase the adoption of mobile health apps. Mobile health applications will provide an economic solution for improving the health outcomes of consumers and provide consumers with tools to  effectively monitor/manage chronic diseases.