Technological advances are almost always a good thing, but they can also cause a sense of uncertainty.
In many industries, including healthcare, it can be a challenge to make sense of rapid advances in technology and put them to use in a beneficial way. For example, artificial intelligence has been around in some form for years, but it is only now poised to become more mainstream and utilized in ways that result in tangible and meaningful advancements in healthcare.
As new advancements enter the marketplace, it seems each year becomes more and more of a whirlwind. Expect 2018 to be no different. Here are five predictions that could play out over the course of the year, including ways AI and digital technology will help improve various facets of healthcare.
1. Hospitals will continue to struggle financially: Insurers are shifting profitable care to so-called "focused factories" such as urgent care and ambulatory surgery centers, while complex, costly care for the aging population remains in hospitals. Further, medical technology is responsible for up to 50 percent in annual cost increases, and health information technology has yet to show it can boost productivity while also reducing costs. Finally, academic hospitals face a cloud of uncertainty after agreeing to cuts in federal funding in exchange for newly insured customers under the Affordable Care Act. This uncertainty could continue to grow in the coming year if the ACA's individual mandate is repealed as a part of a new tax bill.
2. Innovations will begin to unlock clinical records to train AI-enabled technology, despite lack of interoperability: At Amazon's AWS re:Invent event last month, the company unveiled a partnership with Cerner to boost its HealtheIntent platform. Using AWS' cloud infrastructure and additional AI technologies, the goal of the partnership is to speed up the analysis of likely outcomes among patient groups, providing a counter to Epic's recent announcement that it would use AI and machine learning across its products to improve its clinical records system. Expect to see innovations like these increase in the coming year as companies across both healthcare and technology invest in AI.
3. AI in healthcare will gain real traction in revenue cycle and value-based contracting models: Artificial intelligence will show its value under these models in areas including risk adjustment, clinical document improvement (coding, transcription, etc.), and fraud detection. AI, machine learning and natural language processing are in major demand across this sector of the healthcare industry, and we’ll begin to see this demand being met as levels of training data increase and these technologies demonstrate higher levels of human-level accuracy.
4. Drug discoveries will occur through computer modeling and simulation: Novel uses of existing molecules will be discovered by mining large volumes of real-world evidence. “In silico” methods— research using computer modeling and simulation--makes drug discovery and research much more time efficient. Some scientists already claim technology can help develop cancer drugs up to six times faster, as AI and machine learning streamline the optimization process to find the most effective forms of molecules. The result will be a rise in partnerships between pharmaceutical and technology companies which will lead to significant increases in the drug discovery informatics market through 2018 and beyond.
5. Digital health will mature, support services, and become B2B2C: This will occur as the rise of telehealth and Apple Watch adoption among payers and employers leads the way. The recent partnership between Apple and Aetna, in which Aetna will provide free or discounted Apple Watches to its more than 23 million members, is an example of what the B2B2C model can look like in healthcare. As Fitbit showed in early 2017 when it laid off more than 100 employees, the initial wave of solely consumer-based business models failed to meet expectations. This will lead to a growing number of partnerships with players established in the healthcare space in an attempt to leverage the huge amounts of data these tracking devices collect.
In the end, 2018 will be an exciting year for innovation in healthcare. Time will tell whether any or all of these predictions fully come to fruition, but we do know this: advanced technology has never played a larger role in the healthcare industry, and its influence will only continue to grow going forward.
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