In the last year, healthcare technology companies have simultaneously made great strides in making care delivery more connected while also struggling with several major challenges that will only become more pressing in 2020.
To deliver on the hype of their offerings, according to STAT, digital health companies must direct much of their focus in the next year to delivering tangible results, which will be possible only if they find solutions to the issues of profitability, data ownership and algorithmic bias.
Firstly, to prove they can help healthcare organizations reap significant financial rewards, digital health companies may choose to emphasize their "boring but lucrative cloud businesses," per STAT, and by demonstrating the medical viability of their offerings.
Meanwhile, these companies and their hospital partners will also need to restore and strengthen patient trust by increasing transparency in their data usage and, ideally, involving patients in their decision-making processes regarding data sharing.
Finally, racial and gender biases in artificial intelligence will need to be addressed and eradicated as quickly as possible. Per STAT, "the simple truth is this: Any company that fails to audit an algorithm for bias before deploying it in healthcare is courting disaster."
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