SUMMARY

• The HLTH Conference brought together innovators, practitioners, investors, policymakers and analysts, all with a singular focus: to create the future of health.

• Everyone talked about all the right things, from patient centricity, new healthcare delivery modalities, and how new technologies — especially artificial intelligence (AI) — will change everything. 

• Within the discourse, we found three key topics that were not talked about, which we believe are critical to the future of health: A missing category of patients, the repercussions of change in the lives and practices of clinicians, and a lack of evolving the foundations of the healthcare establishment.

• The future of health shouldn’t just be a technology-enabled version of today’s healthcare. We can and should re-imagine it all together.

The 2019 HLTH conference in Las Vegas drew over 6,000 participants into a collective conversation about the future of health. From entrepreneurs to investors, healthcare practitioners, government officials, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, consumer electronics brands, social media giants, and even retailers, the conference was abuzz with an electric air of righteous confidence.

By the end of the first day, a few key themes were percolating every session and escalator discussion: 1. We need to put the patient in the center and treat them like consumers. 2. Technology will allow us to bring health to patients, instead of asking them to come to healthcare institutions - virtual first solutions dominated discussions. 3. AI will provide us with all kinds of insights and solve everything.

Everyone said all the right things, and so many organizations are making monumental advances in the future of health.  

But in the awkward silences of this collective conversation, there were three critical discussions we didn’t hear — and addressing them will make a big difference in impacting the future of health. 

THE THIRD PATIENT CATEGORY 

A clear current of conversation at the conference revolved around patient centricity, but most reduced the patient into two categories: the powerless, victimized patient, and the empowered, in-charge consumer. While these are certainly two stages within peoples’ healthcare journey, they do not describe the entirety of a person’s experience because these two states are not mutually exclusive. There are times when a person can be at the mercy of the healthcare system (i.e. during an acute health condition) and also an empowered consumer (i.e. receiving multiple opinions or taking charge of therapy plan using a digital assistant). 

There is another category that emerges when we reduce people to these two states: Normalcy.  In Normalcy, people are neither acutely sick, nor should be seen as consumers. They are practicing everyday health in their lives, whether they are striving for healthy targets or struggling to meet a certain goal. 

Let’s move beyond how we traditionally see patients or how we profit from them. Deeper, human-centric segmentation and persona analysis studies will complete the picture of peoples’ relationship with their healthcare. Only when we have a more complete picture, can we begin to design a more effective healthcare system. 

THE CHANGING PHYSICIAN EXPERIENCE

While patient empowerment and centricity is a very good thing, we cannot forget that the massive changes within the healthcare industry will also have significant impact on physicians. As we develop digital therapeutics, AI-enabled diagnostic tools and other technology advances, we must also consider the attitudes, motivational triggers and behavioral psychology of physicians. 

Digital therapeutics promise insights from generating more data about each patient, but most clinicians cannot easily change their practices and workflows to account for, make relevant and timely decisions, or provide sound advice to each of their patients based on such information. 

By understanding physicians’ needs, we can truly realize the promise of improving care. When we bring them into the conversation when developing digital health products and services, companies who engage care providers first will be in a better position to gain faster adoption and integration.

THE UNDERLYING FOUNDATION OF HEALTHCARE PRACTICE

Even as recently as three years ago, few people would have guessed that brands such as Google, Facebook, Bose, Walmart, BestBuy or MasterCard would be focused on a health strategy. As the experience of healthcare becomes omnichannel, we need a wider array of  industries to bring innovation to healthcare to diversify thinking and resources when solving large, complex problems.

We can collectively make more headway by applying technology solutions to the myriad problems and inefficiencies of today’s healthcare. But by doing so, we are actually providing additional life support to a healthcare system that was never fundamentally designed to deliver care in today’s world, instead of  re-rendering new versions of the same old healthcare system. We can (and should) do much more to re-imagine a far more efficient and functional healthcare system. 

To truly design a well-functioning, balanced and resilient healthcare ecosystem, we must first understand and acknowledge the nuances of peoples’ health journey throughout their entire lives, understand the psychological and emotional barriers to change within the physician community and the repercussions of these changes.  

Only then can we take a multi-disciplinary approach, applying systems thinking, experience design, behavioral psychology and technology to create a fundamentally new kind of healthcare and a new class of care.