By Dr. Patrick Quinlan

The US medical system achieves remarkable outcomes, but it’s also struggling under immense pressure. Rising demand, a growing disease burden, skyrocketing costs, workforce shortages, and flawed reimbursement structures expose its weaknesses.

Our typical responses – more taxes, cost-shifting, rationing, complexity, and consolidation – have only made care more expensive and disconnected. Incremental changes have turned the system into a boiling pot, leaving patients, families, and clinicians isolated and overwhelmed.

It’s time for bold thinking. We must acknowledge the system’s failures and admit that more funding, people, and complexity are not the answer. Instead, we need a new model that efficiently utilizes current assets while addressing the root causes of escalating healthcare demands. This model should prioritize outcomes that matter most to patients, families, and clinicians – not just what the system can handle.

Hippo Coactive Care is that model.

From Metrics to Meaningful Care

Medicine today faces the challenge of doing more with less – lower reimbursements, rising costs, and growing demand for services. While efficiency is vital, how it’s defined and achieved can often lead to misguided decisions.

Current key performance indicators (KPIs) focus on the “medical factory” model, prioritizing throughput and cost over outcomes that matter most to patients and clinicians. This narrow approach neglects the broader patient experience, including delays, errors, inconvenience, and the emotional toll on patients and families.

Meanwhile, clinicians feel frustrated by a system that prioritizes metrics over meaningful care.

Unfortunately, patients and their families are tasked with managing and measuring the system – the very people who are least equipped to manage it and measure it in its current form. As a result, key questions remain unanswered:

• How difficult is it to get an appointment, let alone follow-ups?
• Can patients afford care, travel, and time off work?
• Are issues resolved promptly and accurately?
• What happens to those who never access care?

Factors like access, satisfaction, and engagement are assessed within the system’s limitations, not from the perspective of patients’ real experiences and expectations. We need deeper key patient outcomes (KPOs) that reflect what truly matters: affordability, timely access, accurate diagnoses, and meaningful support.

While healthcare leaders often rely on “insider care” to navigate the system, many patients endure “outsider care,” struggling with barriers and delays. Listening to those on the outside is crucial to understanding and improving care delivery.

By asking the right questions and focusing on the true patient and clinician experience, we can redefine healthcare success and create a system that serves everyone better.

The Path to Unsustainability

Many key events and achievements in the history of American medicine have set medical education, training, and practice on its current unsustainable course. Understanding this history is essential to creating a new system that prioritizes patient needs, values clinicians, and addresses healthcare disparities effectively.

The 1910 Flexner Report transformed medical education, while the Mayo brothers later pioneered group practice, acknowledging that medical complexity required collaborative care. This shift spurred specialization and the development of integrated delivery systems – networks of clinics and hospitals – and academic medical centers blending care, teaching, and research.

Scientific advancements and the rise of electronic medical records (EMRs) further altered healthcare. While intended to improve care, EMRs prioritized billing and insurance needs over patient and clinician requirements, undermining clinical effectiveness and increasing dissatisfaction.

Payment models would heavily influence system policies, too, driving consolidation, especially in urban areas. This resulted in the “hub-and-spoke” model, where major medical centers draw resources from suburban and rural facilities. Programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and partnerships with insurance and pharmaceutical companies accelerated this trend.

Today’s healthcare system faces a critical challenge. While consolidation offers economies of scale, smaller facilities rarely gain advanced capabilities. In addition, decentralized hubs often fail to adequately support rural clinics and smaller facilities, draining resources and reducing access to care. What remains is a structure that prioritizes efficiency over outcomes, leaving patients and clinicians burdened by complexity.

Fortunately, new technology like Hippo Coactive Care can bridge the gaps in our healthcare system and foster a great opportunity – if not a mandate – to reexamine our purpose, principles, methods, and goals.

A New Path to Better Outcomes

Hippo Coactive Care is a cutting-edge platform that transforms healthcare collaboration by leveraging hands-free Assisted Reality (AR) headsets. Designed for seamless team-based workflows, it enables remote experts and on-site Clinician Extenders™ – nurses, clinicians, or medical assistants – to work together in real time, providing a “through the eyes of the caregiver” experience. The platform supports remote diagnosis, treatment, and patient education with voice-activated, non-intrusive technology that prioritizes patient interaction.

This advanced system enhances care delivery by enabling remote specialists to guide local providers as if they were physically present (a key limiting factor for existing telehealth solutions). Clinician Extenders use the technology to deliver natural, focused care while capturing data and ensuring accurate diagnoses. Its intuitive design, created by clinicians for clinicians, increases productivity, reduces costs, and improves patient and provider satisfaction.

Hippo Coactive Care improves patient outcomes not only at home but also in nursing homes, rural clinics, urgent care centers, community care facilities – and even during EMT interventions. For patients with multiple chronic conditions, the platform integrates healthy behaviors into a simple, consistent self-care plan.

Benefits to Providers

Providers find Hippo Coactive Care to be a refreshing alternative to high-capacity office models. Its patient-focused approach appeals to clinicians burned out by productivity-driven practices, making it easy to recruit volunteers for pilot programs.

Establishing a Coactive Care delivery network is also cost-effective. Most health systems already have the staff, facilities, and technologies needed for pilots, which require minimal support from IT, HR, or legal departments. Deployment is fast, scalable, and affordable at just $10 per use case per day. The simple pricing model allows unlimited participants, and the platform has demonstrated over 90% patient and clinician satisfaction while freeing up as much as 11% of inpatient capacity.

This system is especially effective for high-risk chronic care patients – the 15% of individuals driving 80% of medical costs. Hippo Coactive Care boosts productivity, reduces costs, and generates significant revenue potential – up to $400 per Medicare patient per month through remote care reimbursements.

Launching a pilot is simple. The platform requires nominal support from IT, HR, legal, or ancillary departments, and a coactive team (one specialist and 5-6 staff members) can be trained and operational in just one day. The model is ideal for a primary care practice in a residential area with a large elderly or Medicare Advantage population.

By leveraging Hippo Coactive Care, health systems can deliver the right care at the right time – wherever patients are – while fostering teamwork and achieving better results for all.

Learn more about how you can address physician shortages, optimize productivity, increase capacity, and improve outcomes with Hippo Coactive Care.

 Read our white paper.