This past year saw a big leap in the already substantial enthusiasm for the potential of IoT, Big Data, population health, deep/machine learning, sensor fusion and artificial intelligence to revolutionize healthcare delivery.
Innovators and entrepreneurs, backed by risk capital, have flocked to this digital healthcare space, all with the promise of bringing new data, better information, deeper understanding, more actionable insights, and more refined workflow solutions to catalyze cost-effective healthcare delivery. Even large incumbents — many driven by a vision of innovation, others by concerns of commoditization or obsolescence — are making huge investments from their balance sheets to fully exploit the digital healthcare wave.
Why? Because the benefits are so intuitively obvious and have the potential of being enormously impactful.
Telemedicine applications promise to save money, increase access and improve patient convenience by ‘moving data, not people.’ Remote monitoring applications promise more detailed observations in distributed patient populations. Learning systems offer the promise of actionable insights in individual patients and across populations, derived from multiple, evolving data streams.
Brought together, a vision of a digital healthcare nirvana starts to emerge where critical biometric data is acquired, wherever and whenever it occurs. Then, contextually appropriate algorithms meld with complex data streams, compare to historical and population norms, and interpret in light of individual medical histories, current pharmacologic therapies, emerging clinical, diagnostic and practice guidelines. This can allow for unassailable cues for action to be presented to the treating clinician and engaging, behavior-modifying nudges to the patient.
2017 will be the year when we begin to prove whether our intuition is correct; whether our lofty visions of a smart, learning, connected, integrated, coordinated, and at least semi-automatic healthcare delivery system can be realized.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
And who or what will be the final arbiter? To quote the legendary W. Edwards Deming, “In God we trust, all others bring data.”
But no vague definition of data will suffice.
Given the ongoing plate-tectonic shift in healthcare payment philosophy to one that is focused on clinical outcomes at the lowest cost, the proof points required will need to be just those – objective clinical outcome measures and careful analysis of the overall cost of delivery. The good news is that this message is being transmitted loud and clear as the drumbeat of value-based reimbursement is relentlessly building (e.g., alternative payment models, MACRA, and bundled-payment initiatives).
In addition to providing proof of value, however, clinicians and healthcare delivery systems are also looking for broad solutions vs. ‘point’ offerings (i.e., they don’t want to have to stitch together a group of disparate, narrow products from separate vendors). They want to know that the solutions they select will be seamlessly interoperable with the existing or planned IT infrastructure/EHR as well as with the smart medical/consumer health and wellness devices that are increasingly being used. Hospital systems require assurances about privacy and security, requirements that are becoming the pillars in the now-evolving digital health nirvana.
Digital health solutions will continue their relentless transformation of our healthcare system in 2017, delivering on the promise of a broad set of technological capabilities that has already successfully transformed many other industries. But given the stakes in healthcare, we should expect the burden of proof to be high and rising.
Photo: a-image, Getty Images
