Mike Kaufmann, who recently became chief financial officer of Cardinal Health Inc., a distributor of pharmaceuticals and other medical products, told The Wall Street Journal that the Affordable Care Act has put ”a tremendous emphasis on cost-reduction. And customers are being held accountable for outcomes. Each year as time passes for instance there’s more and more procedures that, when they’re done in a hospital, if a patient is readmitted within a certain amount of time the hospital’s going to have to cover that cost. And so hospitals don’t want a patient to be readmitted….”
”We at Cardinal have been working hard on coming up with ways to help [hospitals] manage for instance those discharged patients. How do we help capture them? How do we make sure, for instance, that we maybe have a pharmacist call that patient, at their home, make sure they’re taking their seven different medications exactly right so they don’t get sick and have drug interaction and end up back in the hospital and the hospital has a lot of cost.”
