With health care reform, many changes are already being felt within clinics today, ranging from EMR's to stimulus packages. Community health care centers have received some additional funding, but with this, there has been an influx of patients. Often, a high capacity of patients pushes resources to the limit. Yes, underserved clinics may hire more employees and upgrade technology with stimulus package funding, but what do they do when they cannot provide for rapidly increasing demand?
In addition, with the requirement for all Americans to be insured, lower income patients will turn increasingly to community health centers for the lowest cost. Will lower income patients be able to afford this new mandatory health insurance? Also, if they do still turn to these underserved clinics for low-cost health care, how will community health centers across the nation compensate for this? Other clinics will begin seeing them as competition for insured patients, and health care may face more capitalistic issues than necessary.
Also, even with government funding of implementation of services such as Electronic Medical Records, will community health centers have the funding to cover the maintenance of such systems? Well, the better question is, will such upgrades continue to be costly after initial setup? They are essentially meant to cut the costs of health care by removing paper fees, but then they run the risk of rapidly decreasing patient confidentiality with so many access points to EMR's.
Yes, these musings have been mostly financially-focused, but in this economic climate, it's sensible to ponder on these things, even in the case of low income health care and underserved clinics.
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