I’m currently in Charlotte, NC, working as a document review attorney. My current case involves hospitals and insurance companies, and my job is to look through thousands of emails in the inboxes of various executive and operational officers. There’s the confidential information that pertains to the case (which obviously I won’t be talking about), the day-to-day minutia of running any business (“So and so is training their replacement because while diligent and hard working, they are not a model of change-friendly leadership” is a masterful bit of corporate-speak), and the personal correspondence that probably shouldn’t have been sent from one’s work email (“My real estate agent is so lazy and lacking initiative he should be a government bureaucrat!”). But there’s also plenty of non-confidential information, from Wall Street Journal articles to slides of public presentations, and that information paints a picture of the medical industry today that I found fascinating, and I think Ricochet will too.

First and foremost, hospitals are well aware that health-care is too expensive, too hard to get, opaque in its pricing, and often wasteful in its execution. Further, they recognize that their options are either to improve themselves or be replaced by more consumer-friendly options. Chief among these ideas is the idea of moving away from “fee-for-service” models, where they are paid the services performed, to a “fee-for-value” model, where they are paid for improving the patient’s situation. Part of this is by reducing complications, a trend that Medicare is pushing by penalizing hospitals that have too many hospital-caused complications.