Healthcare Delivery

This chapter describes the healthcare delivery ecosystem in the U.S., including its structure and key stakeholders. Particular attention is paid to the highly fragmented U.S. ecosystem. Past innovations reviewed include the Flexner Report of 1910, the Social Security Act of 1935, the Medicare and Medicaid legislation of 1965, the Affordable Care Act of 2010, and the pandemic-induced widespread adoption of telemedicine. Contemporary innovations considered include scaling of successful trials, computational policy analysis, approaches to population health, and emerging assistive technologies. These innovations can be enabled by analytics and incentives that address the problems of fragmentation. This approach to transformation requires stakeholders to think differently and learn to collaborate and coordinate. The economic justifications of these investments can be facilitated by broadly-based accounting for revenues, costs, and savings.