2 hits, 0 starter, 2 Misses and 3 Maybe’s
2 Hits
Speech enablement, despite the experience of Amazon and the losses it has from the Alexa solution, remains a central solution and capability that continues to offer new and exciting capabilities. It’s not just navigation and clinical documentation but is increasingly showing promise for clinical diagnosis with clinical disease biomarkers.
AI – Automating Intelligently. Many of the AI solutions remain relatively narrow in the application and not fully generalizable. We are still some way from being able to generalize capabilities but ignore these tools at your peril. They are IMO one of the key tools to reducing unnecessary friction in healthcare. Friction for patients, friction for staff, friction for processes. Remove friction and increase satisfaction with a side benefit of efficiency. What’s not to like – it is not Skynet but rather “HealthNet” that is coming with this raft of tools.
One Zero
Meta bah humbug – virtual worlds are way too far over their skis, but sitting in the background is some valuable training capability and clear use cases for virtualization for extending care and healthcare capabilities to remote and underserved areas. Focus on that and not if you can see someone’s legs in the virtual world.
2 Misses
PBMs and Drug Pricing – Expect a renewed focus on the huge disparities in drug prices levied on the American public. The PBM black box approach and complex mechanisms used to conceal and confuse will come under increasing scrutiny as dissatisfaction rises.
Value-Based Care – this needs a boost to reach critical mass and while the economics could make sense given how long we have been trying at this, it remains underwhelming. There are increasing numbers of models that focus on upping the primary care elements necessary to deliver this style of healthcare and show promise. With enough scale and perhaps a fully open access model to primary care, we could see relief to the overwhelmed emergency department safety net with corresponding economic savings.
3 Maybe’s
Blockchain – the excitement might subdue for a few years but there remains value in specific use cases. If the smart contracting capability could rise above the noise and detritus left by the FTX debacle we could see some real automation of the inexorably painful and costly pre-authorization process. This of course requires that all parties want the process to be efficient and that question remains firmly up in the air without some legislative oversight IMO
Interoperability – With legislation finally in full swing organizations and vendors can no longer limit interoperability and sharing of patient data opening the door to multiple other players. Watch for escalation of fines levied to bring real teeth to the sharing of data. Watch for a few winners to emerge on the integration and unification front of your digital health world.
Home Health Technology – home health and home monitoring technology coming of age and combined with large data processing that could make sense of all these new data points we might start to see the emergence of new a range of bio-markers to catch disease earlier allowing for more cost and clinically effective care to be delivered economically and at scale (by the open access primary care above). Watch especially for the passive systems – set it and forget it will win the day in health monitoring.
