Each year we see a flood of listicle-style articles predicting how hot-ticket health IT trends will transform the industry. This year, analysts expect to see telehealth continue to mature and specialize, growth for remote patient monitoring with wearables and IoT devices, and expanded AI/ML-enabled use cases for provider efficiency and personalized medicine.
Despite the thoughtful analysis of these predictions, we’ve historically struggled to achieve the aspirations of the trends at scale. If we rewind to trends predictions from over twenty years ago, leading institutions had just started anticipating the shift to consumer-centric care. Fast forward to our current decade, and 42% of healthcare consumers in 2020 still felt they did not have access to the right digital tools and applications to meet their needs, despite prolific innovation in this space. To ensure new digital health innovations not only stick, but deliver truly patient-centric and provider-friendly care experiences, healthcare requires a greater level of foundational connectedness across its ecosystem.
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Manisha Shetty Gulati Manisha Shetty Gulati is Chief Growth Officer of Commure. Gulati has spent 20 years in healthcare dedicated to organizations' growth and performance, particularly through innovation in the use of data and technology. Prior to joining Commure, Gulati was the Chief Operating Officer at Clarify Health Solutions. Previously, she was a Partner at […]
Another example is telehealth: After 2020 forced a drastic increase in adoption, there wasn’t a single 2021 predictions piece not talking about telehealth’s imminence to take off. Subsequently, digital health funding increased 138% in 1H of 2021, with telehealth accounting for 30% of all funding. Expanding patient access levels, telehealth usage levels have stabilized at a 38x increase from pre-pandemic levels. These are impressive numbers, but the more we pour into competing innovation – specifically $4.2 billion across 105 deals in the first half of 2021 alone — the more fragmented we become. In its latest report, McKinsey concludes that “in light of the fast proliferation of point solutions, which are overwhelming consumers, payers, and providers alike, there’s a need for better data integration and improved data flows across the various players in the ecosystem.”
To avoid the “trends trap” of heightening the health tech disconnect in the wake of innovation, we must consider how best to proceed in investing and building new technologies that enable long-term transformation of care delivery, not just this year’s trends. To achieve the promises of the 2022 trends from IoT to AI/ML to remote patient monitoring, healthcare organizations must leverage a common architecture that can connect innovations to shift from the tactical deployment to the seamless integration of digital health solutions across the entire ecosystem. In doing so, healthcare will achieve an enduring foundation for care that is connected, people-first, and scalable — no matter what the latest and greatest digital health solution is available.
People-first care: While it is great (and long past time) to see new digital health funding and innovation focus on patients as consumers, we also need to remember the other side of the equation in healthcare — the people who deliver the care. As healthcare digitally evolves, we need to ensure we don’t inadvertently contribute to the already rampant burnout of clinicians, caregivers, and staff. As more digital health innovations enter the market and adoption increases, clinicians need a digital infrastructure that ensures digital health activities can be seamlessly integrated into their daily workflows without inducing digital fatigue – in part that means minimizing screen toggling between tools – to enable fluid hybrid virtual/in-person care delivery.
Connected care: With “personalized care” cemented as a staple buzzword in healthcare, there’s been a surge of health companies catering to different consumers based on specific diagnosis or condition. While analysts predict continued growth for this sector, for care to be truly personalized for patients, it needs to connect into the entire patient health journey. Easier said than done; most new health tech solutions create more dots rather than connections. That’s why 37% of health leaders say that lack of interoperability is the number one barrier to deploying digital health solutions at their hospital or health system. Healthcare organizations need an extensible platform to ensure connectivity and unify disparate points along each patient’s care journey.
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.
Scalable care: Despite astounding innovation and funding poured into digital health, we’ve yet to see scalable changes because we’ve still been chipping around the edges of our massive healthcare system. Traditional players in healthcare — larger health systems and payers — need to be the center of healthcare’s digital transformation in order for us to see measurable, scalable change. But it takes the average hospital nearly two years to identify a digital health need and then develop, deploy and enculturate a solution for it — and that’s assuming the project is on time and goes as planned. A full 80% of health organizations today say their use of advanced analytics is “negligible”. Scale is difficult for digital health innovators as well: We hear time and again how startups get stuck in “pilot” mode with customers without the ability to truly scale quickly. A significant amount of time and energy is spent navigating the complex web of provider systems, health plans, and employers, even for solutions in scale mode. Scalable care requires all of healthcare’s players to be able to innovate with greater speed by starting from harmonization rather than fragmentation.
In order to capitalize on the latest trends while strengthening our ability to deliver connected, people-first care at scale, the healthcare ecosystem requires extensible platforms and digital fabric to unite health providers’ and innovators’ current and future solutions. Health companies need to be able to connect into and activate data from any data source for a unified patient view, inject that data into customizable workflows for a better provider experience, and devise new, fully integrated, data-driven capabilities in order to create the scalable change in healthcare we seek. With this sort of digital strategy, we will ensure each health tech solution is no longer a fragmented innovation – this year’s “trend” – but an element of healthcare’s holistic, connected ecosystem for scalable, people-first care.
Photo: Quardia, Getty Images
Manisha Shetty Gulati is Chief Growth Officer of Commure. Gulati has spent 20 years in healthcare dedicated to organizations' growth and performance, particularly through innovation in the use of data and technology. Prior to joining Commure, Gulati was the Chief Operating Officer at Clarify Health Solutions. Previously, she was a Partner at McKinsey & Company and worked with companies across the healthcare ecosystem in the US and EMEA. Gulati holds a MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of software company Model N and is Vice Chair of the Board of ReSurge International.
