8 Trends in Health Care Today
Consolidation - The healthcare industry is consolidating rapidly as it moves toward value-based care.
Consumerism - The healthcare consumer today is frugal, technology savvy, and seeking convenience.
Telehealth - According to Definitive Healthcare’s 2017 Inpatient Telemedicine Study, over 70 percent of consumers would rather use video than visit their primary care provider in person.
AI & machine learning - Artificial Intelligence is the most talked about technology since the cloud, and for a good reason. There is an explosion of data in our society with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated each day. Hospitals, in particular, have more data than they know what to do with. The first wave of technology adoption in hospitals has been focused on collecting process, patient, financial, and organizational data, but now there is an increasing need to move toward understanding and utilizing this data to decrease costs and improve care.
Staffing shortages - There are two reasons behind the recent healthcare staffing shortage – a shifting workforce and shifting patient demographics. Approximately 55 percent of all registered nurses are 50 years old or older, and 52 percent of the active physician workforce is 55 or older.
Cybersecurity - An increase in mergers and acquisitions have created new vulnerabilities in information sharing. In 2018 alone, we saw many data breaches that exploited healthcare records; eight of those breaches exposed over 500,000 healthcare records, and three of those breaches revealed over a million.
Optimization & Ancillary Technology - Currently, the healthcare technology install base is varied. There are many different vendors targeting different areas of the market. Clearly, the healthcare technology space is crowded and complicated. Information systems need to be able to send a patient’s medical information back and forth in a coordinated manner.
Wearables - The wearable and remote patient monitoring market has just started to take off; the Apple watch can now detect irregular heart rhythms and diabetics can monitor their blood sugar levels with digital glucose monitors.
Courtney Hedderman, Associate State Director Advocacy & Outreach, AARP Illinois