If you want to understand the future of the $3 trillion U.S. healthcare industry, the lesson of the past is to ‘follow the money.’ And no one would argue that the place to do that is the infamous JP Morgan Healthcare Conference taking place this week in San Francisco.
While there are an estimated 4,000 people attending the conference, there’s roughly another 20,000 here for ‘off the grid’ meetings in every nook and cranny you can find. It is a surreal atmosphere in the form of the top executives from more than 450 private and public companies in biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device and technology, as well as healthcare providers, payers, private equity and venture capital firms and investment banks. Simply stated, this is where medicine’s flow happens.
With that said, roughly $1 trillion or one-third of annual U.S. healthcare spend flows through hospitals and healthcare delivery systems. So, if you want to understand what’s happening now and what will happen in the future, a good place to start is in the nonprofit healthcare provider track, where CEOs and CFOs of over 20 of our nation’s largest healthcare delivery systems presented their strategic plans in rapid fire 25-minute presentations.
Together these organizations represent over $100 billion or 10 percent of that $1 trillion spend. Incredible. The average organization presenting had over $6 billion in annual revenue, 15 hospitals, close to 30,000 employees and thousands of physicians on staff. Many of the name brands in healthcare including Downers Grove, Ill.-based Advocate Health Care, Irving, Texas-based CHRISTUS Health, Cleveland Clinic, Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System, Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, Indianapolis-based IU Health, Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente, Cincinnati-based Mercy Health, New York-Presbyterian, Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine, Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y., and Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health based in West Orange, N.J., presented along with leading children’s hospitals such as Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and innovative physician focused models such as Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin and Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa.
This provided an incredibly important snapshot of both the ground level view of what’s happening in the real world today as well as the bets being placed for the future. What follows is a high-level perspective of what was shared by these prominent provider organizations.
So, follow the money…and here’s the Top 10 Trends shaping how that money is flowing:
HENRY KOTULA 