Browse the corpus

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has had a particularly unique impact on the conduct of physicians as well as auxiliary health care providers like nurses. Proponents of the Act say its linking Medicare payments to readmission rates disincentivized readmissions and thereby encouraged physicians to develop leadership skills to increase the quality of care.[11] Proponents of the Act also believe that it helped public health nurses to integrate primary care with broader public health, prioritize preventative health care, and coordinate care more efficiently with other providers.[12] The ACA also accounts for new payment methodologies, based on outcomes, replacing traditional "fee for service" payments. Therefore mandating hospitals to implement new programs by creating "care coordinators"- paid nurses who make sure that patients are getting appropriate follow-up care, thereby optimizing hospital reimbursement. These new implementations also require complex data reporting, need for sophisticated information technologies; thus, institutions have to be prepared to adapt to the new healthcare trends. On the other hand, health care providers have to work in conjunction with other hospital interprofessional teams and subspecialties to get through this cultural transformation to better acclimate to the new methodologies. Due to changes in reimbursements, increasing regulations, need for expensive electronic medical record systems (EMRs), individual physician practices are having a tougher time and eventually either bought or merged into larger groups and hospital-owned practices.