Top 5 Takeaways About the Future of Healthcare

1. Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovation, a concept introduced by Clayton Christensen in 1997, is about process rather than technology. It describes how new, cost-effective products or services start at the market's low end and improve over time, eventually disrupting established players. This framework reveals how small startups can transform entire industries.

But disrupting the health industry isn’t easy. It means creating innovation that changes traditional thinking and business practices with an entirely new health-delivery template.

An obvious example is how telemedicine has increasingly shifted care away from in-person provider visits to remote consultations. 

Telemedicine has erased geographical barriers and grants patients improved access to healthcare services. It provides increased convenience for receiving routine healthcare services by integrating virtual triage with virtual visits, easy access of patients to Personal Health Records and to a network of providers from which they can choose the ones that suit them and potentially lower healthcare premiums by the use of virtual healthcare provider as the first point of care. Telemedicine is also a tool that contributes to better management of behavioral disorders, especially in areas affected by shortages of psychiatrists and mental health providers.

It’s also evident how remote patient monitoring is shifting post-acute recovery in hospitals to patients' homes instead. More rapid iteration is driving continuous product improvement and delivering scale beyond helping thousands of people to help millions and the healthcare system itself.

2. AI and Our Roles

AI won't replace physicians but will transform our roles. AI will handle many repetitive tasks, freeing us to focus on patient-centered care. Embracing AI is crucial to remaining relevant and effective in our work.

One example of this machine-human partnering is the way the AI speech recognition software Corti is used by Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) to do just that. It’s being utilized by Boston Emergency Medical Responders (Boston EMS) to cut an hour-long emergency response down to fifteen minutes so they can help more people. (taken from your first book)

The rapid developments in computational technology are making it possible for AI to supplement the skills of human surgeons. Although the potential of the surgeon-patient-computer link is a long way from being fully realized, the use of AI in surgery is already driving significant changes in surgical procedures.

Our roles are shaped by the progress of AI's integration into healthcare. For instance, teams of clinicians, researchers, or data managers involved in clinical trials can speed up the process of medical coding search and confirmation—a process crucial to conducting and concluding clinical studies. Clinicians can also improve and customize patient care using AI to comb through medical data to predict or diagnose disease faster and more accurately. Healthcare payers can personalize their health plans by connecting a virtual agent via conversational AI with members interested in customized health solutions plans by connecting a virtual agent via conversational AI with members interested in customized health solutions. 

3. Generative AI

When evaluating generative AI, consider the Gartner Hype Cycle. We are nearing the "valley of despair," but persistence will lead us to a phase of productive innovation.

By applying the five essential phases of a technology’s life cycle to generative AI, we can have a clearer understanding of how this revolutionary technology is already impacting healthcare stakeholders, from private payers to hospitals and physicians.

In the private payer's area, consider the care plans for insured members generated with this tool, the reports about the providers’ performance, the summaries, and outcomes for prior authorization requests, or the contribution it brings to “first draft” product overviews for Affordable Care Act and Medicare Advantage members, employers and brokers.

Hospitals and physicians are harnessing the immense potential of Generative AI by leveraging immense amounts of structured and unstructured data to generate summaries, videos, or images for patient education, issuing summaries that detect coding errors in claims, and preparing the notes issued by medical specialists for primary care clinicians.

These are just a few examples of how gen AI can help us reduce healthcare expenses and transform how we interact with patients, who benefit from high-quality health services, more informed medical decisions, and improved health outcomes.  

4. Jobs to Be Done

As Clayton Christensen explains, this concept means that people do not seek to buy products or services but to accomplish certain Jobs that occur in their lives. Or, more briefly, it’s about how customers want to “hire” a product to do a job. For instance, when marketing a milkshake, grasping its role in the customer's life helps tailor services and products more effectively.

In healthcare, patients’ choices to accomplish a Job are not reduced to products or services in one sector. For instance, hospitals have as competitors: new prescription medications, retail clinics, gyms, healthy foods shops, and even sites that provide medical advice, which patients might value just as much as seeing a care provider.

Jobs to Be Done enables businesses to engage in new avenues for innovation if they rethink their models to ensure they create what customers need. Their propositions to customers should be simple enunciations that resonate with the Jobs to accomplish.

A deep understanding of customers’ purchase behavior in healthcare is vital for changing the consumption and delivery of healthcare

5. Prototyping Over Piloting

Instead of launching large-scale pilots, develop prototypes of your innovations. This iterative approach, inspired by engineering, emphasizes continuous testing and learning. The mantra should be "experiment and refine."

Prototyping allows healthcare specialists to test the desired interactions and interconnections within and among a system as a whole and then study what impact each change might have on that system. Preclinical experiments for instance have stopped many clinical trials before they began preventing the hurting of human research subjects but have also paved the way for successful clinical trials that led to the development of new drugs and therapies that positively impacted the lives of countless patients.

Developing a mindset that embraces prototyping will benefit us and our patients as we channel our resources toward improving the healthcare system by testing and adopting innovative technologies, revolutionary therapies, and ground-breaking disease-management devices.