White paper: Bending the curve: Addressing rising costs in healthcare

This paper considers the main influencers of medical inflation – utilisation and unit cost – and outlines Aetna’s belief that risk must be transferred to healthcare providers, hospitals and patients – not to shift financial responsibility, but to focus on care that produces better outcomes.

Key findings:

• Individuals need support to make lifestyle changes to benefit their health. That means radically transforming how health institutions function so that they focus more on proactive health and wellness interventions and less on episodic, reactive care that only treats people once they get sick.
• Technology must be embraced to provide: predictive analytics to find high-risk individuals; data mining to improve patient profiling; and electronic health records to better inform care.
• Collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem must be improved. The focus must be on outcomes achieved, not services rendered.
• As important as it is to bend the cost curve, it’s even more important to reduce pain and suffering and improve quality of life.

This paper from Aetna International shares some of its medical cost containment strategies that aim to temper the impact of healthcare burdens.