Future of Health 2023 & beyond

It’s been wonderful to see the UC Davis Health Future and Health community grow since its inception at JPM 2022. 200+ healthcare execs and practitioners spanning payers, providers, and life sciences braved the bay area storm to meet with and learn from some of the best minds in the industry, during JPM 2023. Amazing to see the community be so open about sharing the challenges and opportunities and how technology can be leveraged to improve efficiency and drive down costs.

UC Davis health is at the forefront of being a forward-thinking organization and a great convener of important conversations when it comes to openly sharing challenges and solutions in the healthcare industry. Dr. Ashish Atreja, MD, MPH kicked off the conversation and spoke about the power of technology to eliminate both space and time constraints, but we need to build evidence of what’s working and what’s not in digital health. Separate hype from reality and look beyond the hype cycle and truly how and where value creation happens. Technology optimization was a hot topic across all panels.

Dr. David Lubarsky and Congressman Ami Bera spoke about the omnibus bill & what the federal government is thinking as far as the future of tele-health and telemedicine. How will the regulatory environment change to support and accommodate tech adoption. What is the path to making sure incentives of the health plans, hospitals and providers are aligned to integrate healthcare delivery and eliminate the inefficiencies. Make sure to give this important conversation a listen, here!

Top of mind for health systems & plans: 2023 was the toughest year on record for hospitals- approximately 53% of hospitals in the US operated at a net loss. Supply chain costs are up, labor costs have skyrocketed because of unionization, great resignation etc, which is unsustainable. There are opportunities from a digital & tele-health perspective to drive costs down and efficiency up. However, there are challenges when it comes to getting people to use technology as a care recipient and it will be key to overcome it from an adoption standpoint. Some hospitals are seeing success from a remote patient monitoring standpoint. More here!

At home care – Groups like CVS, Walmart, Walgreens, and BestBuy health are making big bets on home healthcare being the hottest topic this year. All of them are looking to invest in direct to patient businesses including setting up clinical sites, best in class wearable devices, and telemedicine solutions. They understand that patients are more likely to embrace healthcare if they are empowered using technology that makes sense and have access to it. They are working closely with investment groups, payer networks, and government organizations to realize the vision of technology enabled healthcare for all. More on the conversation here!

Digital Therapeutics and Breakthrough Tech at JPM 23:

Dr. Yauheni Solad MD MBA led a panel conversation on breakthrough technologies in 2022 and how they will affect the practice of medicine and healthcare delivery in 2023. The panel spoke about tailwinds for DTx and clinical implications of care automation in 2023 and beyond. Panelists also dove deep into regulatory and, specifically payment, the landscape for billable care automation tools. Ethical implication of care automation during the development, validation, and clinical implementation and strategies to avoid the digital divide with the growing adoption of care automation tools. Worth a listen here!

Creating value in 2023 for digital health: Ritesh Patel led a conversation on how innovation in digital health is creating value for biopharma and health systems. Digital health and digital medicine are becoming top of mind conversations for everyone post pandemic. Digital adoption within the population has dramatically accelerated during and post pandemic. People have been more receptive (providers, payer, pharma included) to the idea of digital health and medicine than ever before. $29B was invested in health related ventures in 2021 and doubled yoy since 2019, but 2022 saw a massive reset. For startups and the market has shifted significantly and it’s more important than ever to have sufficient runway if you are a small business. More on this conversation, here!

Building an open data ecosystem: There is yottabytes of data just in the US Healthcare system. When it comes to datasets, the volume, the variability, and complexity make it very hard to make sense of it and then you add the regulatory compliance on top of it. Better and evolving frameworks, cloud infrastructures and computing power are allowing healthcare systems to create value from the data and make sense of it and this is expected to get better over the next 5/10 years. How do we create an open data ecosystem from siloed & very often biased datasets was an important topic of discussion that is also top of mind for healthcare execs. Ashish Atreja, MD, MPH , John Halamka, M.D., M.S. , Atul Butte & Todd Crosslin talked about best practices and initiatives that lay the framework for an open data ecosystem and shared some tangible examples like benefits (research, grants, operational wins, set benchmarks and compare and contrast ) of bringing all the data together for 6 UC academic health centers under a central warehouse. Checkout their conversation here!

Regardless of the headwinds we are facing now, we live in promising times. This year will help to weed out some of the noise in the industry and allow companies to focus on what is truly driving value for their business and for patients.

Thanks to my colleague Akhil for contributing to this post!

Join us at #SXSW and #VIVE2023 as we continue the conversation!