USA Healthcare: predicted trends 2015 (Part 3)

“Health care delivery will be revolutionized by 1990, with most large metropolitan areas having implemented vertically-integrated health facilities coordinated by computer… [including] physicians’ offices, neighborhood health care centers, hospitals, university medical centers, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and home health care.” - a quote from 1978 by Gideon Gartner, one of the godfathers of the market research industry which I found in a Forbes article from December 2014. A failed prediction so far… But not to worry. End of the year or start of the year we get flooded with predictions; of course, healthcare could not avoid this pandemic. Some are your garden variety common sense predictions and bring nothing new to the table. Others are way too speculative to bring anything of value to the table... We have compiled a list of what we think is more than common sense but more than simple fantasy (in order of probability): mobile healthcare, proactive healthcare paradigm shift, physician extenders and gene mapping.
Today we talk about the physician extenders.

Beyond the doctor-only model: physician extenders

Less doctors are available in the USA, they offer overall less time to patients and at increasingly higher costs. PwC sees a trend that will mature into wide acceptance of physician “extenders”: we are talking about nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and pharmacists that are in theory restricted (depending on each state’s legislation) from helping directly a patient. Below you can see a color coded map reproduced from the PwC report which shows how much things have to change from the current state of affairs to catch up with US consumer comfort (ranging between 66 % to 87%) in seeing a nurse practitioner or physician assistant instead of a doctor when facing minor to moderate health issues.

What do you think of this prediction? Send us the probability you will assign for it happen and will publish it below. 10%? 50% ?100%? Let us know!