Top 10 Health Care Industry Predictions For The Year 2020

Here is how I see the dialog around our nation’s health care system evolving in 2020.

1. The push to deliver home-based care will continue
2. The balance of power will begin to shift from hospital systems back to physician groups
3. Drug pricing will continue to be a front-page issue; at the same time, pharmaceutical innovation will also dominate headlines
4. Medicare-for-All will quickly morph into “Medicare Advantage-for-All
5. Big Tech and Silicon Valley will continue to play in health care, but they won’t upend the system anytime soon
6. On a related note, big box retailers and other atypical organizations will attempt to enter the health care market with a big splash
7. Amid revelations about data privacy, companies that are transparent and ethical will come out ahead
8. When it comes to social determinants of health, expect more talk than action
9. Mental health conditions and substance abuse disorders will take the main-stage
10. The public will begin to examine the behaviors and practices of “non-profit” health systems

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Artificial Intelligence Could Help Solve America's Impending Mental Health Crisis

Five years from now, the U.S.’ already overburdened mental health system may be short as many as 15,600 psychiatrists as the growth in demand for their services outpaces supply, according to a 2017 report from the National Council for Behavioral Health. But some proponents say that, by then, an unlikely tool—artificial intelligence—may be ready to help mental health practitioners mitigate the impact of the deficit.

The full TIME article can be viewed at this link.  

How DNA Testing Will Accelerate Precision Medicine, Preventive Care

In May 2018, Geisinger Health System announced that it would soon include genomic sequencing in routine clinical care to advance precision medicine and improve patient outcomes.

The goal of the project, Geisinger stated at the time, was to go beyond standard methods of care like cholesterol checks, mammographies, and colonoscopies to identify patients at high risk of certain conditions. 

“Originally, we offered genomic sequencing only to certain patient groups, so that we could test people’s perceptions of the test and to make sure everything was running smoothly from an operational standpoint. We picked two of our larger clinics at Geisinger and did a slow launch,” said Christa Martin, PhD, FACMG, director of the Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute at Geisinger.

“Since we launched the project, we’ve tested over 800 patients. We're getting ready to launch DNA screening in three additional clinics within the next few months, and we'll be offering it to all patients.”

The full Health IT Analytics article can be viewed at this link.  

Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2018

Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2018 presents statistics and trends for STDs in the United States through 2018. This annual publication is intended as a reference document for policy makers, program managers, health planners, researchers, and others who are concerned with the public health implications of these diseases. 

The full CDC report can be viewed at this link.

Humana: Value-Based Care Report

Physicians in value-based agreements with Humana are evolving and seeing results. This report details three key areas of data: prevention, outcomes and cost and payments for Humana Medicare Advantage individual members assigned to primary care physicians in value-based agreements.

Humana shares these results annually to spotlight physicians’ progress and to highlight how the company supports them helping their patients achieve their best health.

The full report can be viewed at this link.  

What Fintech Can Do For Healthcare

In most countries, the process of paying for health coverage is not just costly, but complicated, stressful, and time consuming. It also prohibits people from accessing care.

If exorbitant prescription drug prices and out of pocket expenses were not already enough, healthcare consumers must also navigate payment systems known for their obscurity and susceptibility to error. These systems not only overwhelm current users, but also discourages new ones from finding the coverage that is right for them.

The relationship between a healthcare consumer and their healthcare financing should not—and does not—have to be so fraught. As health services becoming increasingly digital, more opportunities open up for companies to stage data driven interventions that can modernize, and hopefully revitalize, our fragmented healthcare networks.

Such is the aim of fintech, or financial technology, that brings new and improved digital financial service models into the healthcare space. Fintech companies are leveraging powerful innovations blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to eliminate the inefficiencies and knowledge gaps endemic to most healthcare payment plans. With few exceptions, what unites them all is their ability to streamline the flow of information and money between patients and providers—and in doing so, save everyone involved precious time and effort.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Protecting Explainable AI Innovations In Health Care

Health care innovators are developing artificial intelligence algorithms called Explainable AI (XAI) that actually reveal the logic behind their diagnoses. Because their results can be verified, doctors and regulators will be more likely to adopt these algorithms than traditional “black box” AI. However, the transparency that makes these algorithms valuable to practitioners also makes the technology trickier to protect as intellectual property.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

How Are We Going To Use Our Health Data For Public Good?

Google is accessing the health data of millions of Americans, supposedly to develop algorithms able to diagnose some medical problems. What it is doing is legal, but has set off a privacy scare and a federal inquiry after an employee of the company wrote an anonymous article in The Guardian highlighting the lack of anonymity and concerns about the possible uses of the data in the future.

Known internally as Project Nightingale, the project involves some 250 employees from Google and from the health giant Ascension: Google has denied any wrongdoings or privacy violations stating that the company is just building a new internal search tool for the Ascension hospital network and that no patient data is being used for Google’s artificial intelligence research. This is an extremely interesting project, but one that requires strict privacy protections. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which also works on health-related issues through its companies Calico or Verily, and that recently acquired Fitbit, is not the only technology company interested in data collection and its analysis: Apple has been hiring doctors for some time and working with Stanford University to develop macro-studies with almost half a million users using heart rate data provided by their Apple Watches; Amazon also seems to have set its sights on the healthcare market.

These types of studies, which combine machine learning and the obvious expertise of these companies to handle mass health data, are a new frontier in the field of medicine, where studies are much less ambitious and typically involve much lower amounts of data, while offering the possibility of great advances for society. That said, concerns are justified if the studies take place under conditions that allow, by action or omission, the health data of its participants to be exposed or used for purposes other than originally established, or if people are not allowed to opt out, as seems to be the case.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

The right tech can help give doctors back time with patients: AMA CEO

Augmented intelligence (AI) is certain to be a key player in revolutionizing health care for the next generation of physicians and patients. But what about actual intelligence, the kind produced by human brains?  

It, too, will be instrumental, AMA Executive Vice President and CEO James L. Madara, MD, noted in his address to delegates at the opening session of the 2019 AMA Interim Meeting in San Diego.  

The full AMA article can be viewed at this link.  

Patients’ and public views and attitudes towards the sharing of health data for research: a narrative review of the empirical evidence

International sharing of health data opens the door to the study of the so-called ’Big Data’, which holds great promise for improving patient-centred care. Failure of recent data sharing initiatives indicates an urgent need to invest in societal trust in researchers and institutions. Key to an informed understanding of such a ’social license’ is identifying the views patients and the public may hold with regard to data sharing for health research.

We performed a narrative review of the empirical evidence addressing patients’ and public views and attitudes towards the use of health data for research purposes. The literature databases PubMed (MEDLINE), Embase, Scopus and Google Scholar were searched in April 2019 to identify relevant publications. Patients’ and public attitudes were extracted from selected references and thematically categorised.

Twenty-seven papers were included for review, including both qualitative and quantitative studies and systematic reviews. Results suggest widespread—though conditional—support among patients and the public for data sharing for health research. Despite the fact that participants recognise actual or potential benefits of data research, they expressed concerns about breaches of confidentiality and potential abuses of the data. Studies showed agreement on the following conditions: value, privacy, risk minimisation, data security, transparency, control, information, trust, responsibility and accountability.

Our results indicate that a social license for data-intensive health research cannot simply be presumed. To strengthen the social license, identified conditions ought to be operationalised in a governance framework that incorporates the diverse patient and public values, needs and interests.

The full article can be downloaded below.