Healthcare organizations cannot afford to ignore consumers in 2019, as a number of major trends shape the future of care delivery (and a number of other trends warrant more critical thinking).

This article was first published March 18, 2019, by MedPage Today.

By Joyce Frieden, news editor, MedPage Today

PHILADELPHIA — The consumer will be where it’s at for population health in 2019, David Nash, MD, MBA, said here Monday at a Population Health Colloquium sponsored by Thomas Jefferson University.

“Whatever business model empowers the consumer, wherever she is,” including at home, will spell success, according to Nash, who is dean of Jefferson’s School of Population Health. “That’s where population health must go.”

Nash noted that back in 1990, Kodak, Sears, and General Electric were the most important companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average; all those companies have disappeared or almost disappeared today.

“If we ignore the consumer, it will be at our peril,” Nash said, citing home healthcare, telehealth, and the use of wearables among the trends to watch in the coming year.

Nash, who is a columnist for MedPage Today, also cited these other trends to watch:

• The growth of Medicare Advantage and managed Medicaid. “These are two programs that are working,” he said. “They’re working because they deliver value — high-quality care with fewer errors — and they follow our mantra: no outcome, no income.”
• Tax reform. “Whatever your politics are [on this issue], park it at the door,” he said. “The sugar high is over, and now we’re in a carbohydrate coma. We’ve got the biggest deficits in American history; if we continue to spend money we don’t have, what will that do to healthcare? I think it will bite us in the butt when [it] comes to the Medicare trust fund.”
• Precision medicine and population health. “[There is a notion] that precision medicine and population health are actually kissing cousins,” said Nash. “They are inexorably linked.”
• Continued deal-making. The CVS/Aetna, UnitedHealth Group/DaVita, and Humana’s deals with Kindred Healthcare and Curo Health Services are just some of the more recent examples, he said. And he noted, the healthcare company formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase now has a name: Haven. “It’s a place where they’re going to figure it all out and they’ll let us know when they do.”
• Continued delivery system consolidation. “Big surprise there,” he said sarcastically. “The real question is will they deliver value? Will they deliver synergies?” Nash noted that his own institution is a good example of this trend, having gone from one or two hospitals 5 years ago to 16 today with another two in the works.
• Population health technology. “The gravy train of public money into this sector will [soon] be over; now the real challenge is for the IT [information technology] systems on top of those legacy companies; can they create the patient registry information and close the feedback loop, and give doctors, nurses, and pharmacists the information they need to improve care?”
• The rise of “population health intelligence.” “That’s our term for predictive analytics, big data, artificial intelligence, and augmented intelligence … It says we don’t want to create software writers — we want doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others who can glean the usable information from the terabyte of information coming our way, to [know how to interpret it].”
• Pharmaceutical industry disruption. “This is really under the thumb of consumers … It’s all about price, price, price,” Nash said. “We’ve got to find a way to rationalize the pricing system. If we don’t, we’re going to end up with price controls, and as everybody in this room with a background in this area knows, those don’t work either.”
• More venture capital money. Nash described his recent experience at the JPMorgan Chase annual healthcare conference, where people were paying $1,000 a night for hotel rooms that would normally cost $250, and being charged $20 just to sit in the lobby of one hotel. “What was going on there? It was more private-sector venture money coming into our industry than ever before. [These investors] know that when there’s $1 trillion of waste in an industry, it’s ripe for disruption.”
• Workforce development. This is needed for the entire industry, said Nash. “More folks know a lot more [now] about population health, quality measurement and management, Lean 6 Sigma, and improving processes and reducing waste. The only way we’re going to reduce that waste of $1 trillion is to have the right kind of workforce ready to go.”

Lawton Burns, PhD, MBA, director of the Wharton Center of Health Management and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania here, urged the audience to look critically at some of these possible trends.

“You need to look for evidence for everything you hear,” said Burns, who coauthored an article with his colleague Mark Pauly, PhD, about the need to question some of the commonly accepted principles of the healthcare business.

Some of the ideas that merit more critical thinking, said Burns and Pauly, are as follows:

• Economies of scale
   
• Synergy
   
• Consolidation
   
• Big data
   
• Platforms
   
• One-stop shops
   
• Disruption
   
• Killer apps
   
• Consumer engagement

“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those 10 things, but we ought to seriously consider” whether they’re real trends, Burns said. As for moving “from volume to value” in healthcare reimbursement, that idea “is more aspiration than reality” at this point, he said. “This is a slow-moving train.”

Burns also questioned the motives behind some recent healthcare consolidations. In reality, “most providers are positioning themselves to dominate local markets and stick it to the payers — let’s be honest,” he said. “You have to think when you hear about providers doing a merger, you have to think what’s the public rationale and what’s the private rationale? The private one is [often] more sinister than you realize.”