Meet the Trump Healthcare Administration

February 09, 2017

The common threads between the four key influencers in the Trump healthcare administration are de-regulation, price transparency, and patient responsibility.  We are potentially entering a very different era from the Obama administration.  Since enactment of the ACA, the health IT market has been undergoing more than five years of government mandates around technology adoption.  HGP has described the health IT market like a game of policy Whac-A-Mole – vendors are constantly required to react to a steady mandate of feature requirements, alternative payment models, quality reporting, and compliance provisions.  During the HITECH and ACA implementation era, we made the case that the health IT market behaves more like a policy-based economy than a market-based economy.  The next chapter is likely to perpetuate initiatives around value-based care but using dramatically different forces: the Trump administration is forcefully advocating free-market levers in healthcare and across all sectors.  Strong on rhetoric but sparse on details, plans for the future are uncertain.  The best indicator of what to expect is the observation of past programs and an analysis of current frameworks outlined by the key healthcare leaders in this new administration.