Seven Healthcare Trends You Don't Want to Ignore

I recently had the pleasure of attending a lecture and discussion at MATTER, Chicago’s healthcare startup incubator and innovation lab led by Liz Connelly, JP Morgan’s head of commercial healthcare banking. The session focused on key trends and insights discussed throughout JP Morgan’s Annual Healthcare Conference.

The JP Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference brings together top investors and healthcare leaders to discuss the major trends, issues, and innovations facing the healthcare industry. Over the past several years, the focus has been mainly on the changes associated with the Affordable Care Act and the notable, sustained increase in vertical integration as well as deal volumes between large healthcare systems and physician groups.  While these trends continue to be relevant, here are a few emerging ones to watch:

Partnerships: Partnerships between healthcare organizations, retail clinics, startup incubators, industry thought leaders, and academic institutions are critical to healthcare organizations’ continued success. Partnerships drive progress, efficiency, and diversified revenue streams. Prepare for a heightened focus on the development of non-core services, like post-acute care options and ambulatory surgical care (ASC) centers.

Innovation: We will continue to see greater investment dollars by not-for-profit systems in areas of innovation. For example, ORBIS brings its flying eye hospital to the most remote communities in the world, increasing the accessibility of vision care in its effort to fight blindness.

Branding: Branding, marketing, notoriety, and a recognizable name brand are key to differentiating as competition accelerates. Providers will invest more in branding while ensuring access is heightened to outpatient services. Healthcare organizations are continually refining their go-to-market strategies, willing to invest and divest services, and retool the core offerings in their target marketplaces. More than 50 percent of gross revenues will be derived from outpatient care.

Digital Health: Digital and mobile health options will continue to flourish. Kaiser Permanente recorded nearly 22 million e-visits in 2015 and this number should continue to rise as digital health tools and initiatives enable disruption and drive efficiency. Healthcare organizations see digital health as a main driver for population health management.

Total Physician Health Management: HCOs will be focused more than ever on driving total population health management amongst their constituents. This ties directly back to reimbursement, marketing, and innovation.

Consumer Experience: The consumer experience is paramount in areas of heightened competition, and healthcare provider organizations will continue doubling down on ways to improve the consumer experience. Development dollars will focus on creating friction-less transactions through the increased prevalence of easy payment facilitation workflows, modules, apps, multi-modal access to healthcare, the introduction of loyalty rewards programs, and heightened outpatient offerings.

Driving Efficiency: Recurring costs, cash management, defining true fixed cost, and operational quality improvement initiatives will be the focus on driving efficiency operationally.

With the consumer revolution demanding excellence at hand, clients must be more interested than ever in developing innovative, technologically minded solutions to difficult problems. Avaap is firmly committed to assisting our clients navigate the aforementioned trends in a variety of ways, and has vast experience developing and implementing innovative solutions to the issues facing our clients.

Ian Strug is revenue cycle solutions manager at Avaap where he is responsible for helping healthcare organizations that use Epic transform revenue cycle management processes to reduce costs and optimize performance. You can reach him using the form below.