Where Healthcare is Headed: Key Currents at HLTH 2022
SUMMARY
HLTH 2022 continues to be a gathering of health industry experts to share conversations and ideas to push the future of health into much needed-corners of progress
Three overarching currents are driving change.
Companies like Walmart are leveraging existing infrastructure to bring primary care to more patients and customers
Considering home to be the center of health opens up opportunities to improve intimate forms of care
Wearables, apps, and technologies are on a mission to sense every possible aspect of the human body and condition
To take a pulse on the state of the health industry, we—along with 10,000 others—headed to Las Vegas to attend HLTH 2022 (noted by speaker Lance Armstrong as a peculiar location to play host for such conversations), the organization’s first fully in-person event in what is hoped to be a post-pandemic world. With 300 speakers participating in panel discussions, fireside chats, ‘Shark Tank’ style competitions, and traditional presentations, the themes of the event ranged widely from value-based care and health equity, to epigenetics.
Over the course of the event, we found three overarching currents that indicate where the health industry is headed in the future.
Improving primary care from two directions
As noted by Alyssa Jaffee, a partner at 7WireVentures “Primary care drives 70% of care visits. This is really large, low-hanging fruit for making a significant impact.” While nearly everyone at HLTH aligns with the idea that there’s significant room for improving primary care, some are challenging the notion of bringing new infrastructure and technology to the existing healthcare enterprise, and hypothesizing that it may be more effective to rebuild a new healthcare enterprise on top of existing infrastructure and technology.
Companies who are pursuing opportunities to sell their technologies into existing healthcare organizations are positioning their infrastructure as a chassis onto which a new model of primary care can be built. Amazon, a brand synonymous with applying cutting-edge technology to large-scale infrastructure, recently launched its Amazon Clinic to support that very notion of infrastructure models for healthcare.
Taking a different strategy, Walmart is opening in-store healthcare clinics across healthcare deserts where access to care is severely limited or non-existent. Dr. Cheryl Pegus, EVP of health and wellness at Walmart said the company is meeting patients where they are. For Walmart, that looks like designing services based on a holistic view of their patient populations —from buying grocery or household items or going to the pharmacy—and consumer-centric pricing strategies with the ultimate goal to encourage whole health integration and healthy choices for customers.
Even One Medical is training residents in their clinics to change their mindset between ‘standard’ vs. ‘alternative’ sites of primary care, arguing that models like their clinics are rapidly becoming the standard of care, and to train the next generation of care providers who are confident in delivering care in such environments.
Health at home is now entering mainstream
Undeniably, many organizations are innovating for home being the center of health, bringing what was once a fringe idea into the main discourse. We heard two ways in which organizations are innovating:
The first is by re-inventing the hospital in the home. Technologies like remote patient monitoring, at-home diagnostics, and the miniaturization and mobilization of traditionally large, fixed technologies are enabling hospital-level care in the home. Companies like Dispatch Health continue to serve more and more communities by bringing well-equipped health professionals to patient’s front door, and ultimately diverting the rising expense of emergency department visits.
The second strategy is by re-inventing the home to be a place of health, and some organizations are re-imagining health-related utilities of everyday activities in the home. For example, Best Buy Health does so by leveraging consumer technologies already in the home to provide a range of services to support home monitoring or delivering health-related interventions.
Sensors everywhere, sensing everything
The interest, investment, and innovation in products that provide more data about more aspects of our health was palpable and undeniable.
Charles Augner from health2047 and a judge on a ‘Shark Tank’ style startup pitch competition, expressed his bullishness for technology platforms that proliferate the use of sensors in as many use-cases as possible. Examples include:
Traditional diagnostics, like Grail’s Galleri molecular diagnostics test that screens consumers for more than 50 types of cancers through a single blood draw.
Consumer-grade wearables, such as a sweat sensor that non-invasively provides information about blood glucose, lactate, and other markers for athletes to optimize their health.
Algorithm-based apps, such as Humanity, that claim to use data from other wearables to algorithmically provide behavioral modifications to encourage living healthier and longer.
A combination of all of the above, such as startup AgeRate, which claims to use epigenetic markers through ongoing diagnostic tests, combined with wearables data to provide the subscriber with their biological age.
Still highly fragmented with companies focusing on single indications, markers or use-cases, the fast proliferation of these devices will be competing for ‘skin real-estate’, as consumers wear rings, bands, watches, patches, straps, earrings and clothing, all of which are sending signals about all aspects of their lives.
Invariably, the conversations about the proliferation of sensors and quantification have inspired the data-philes to also dream about the insights and benefits that the healthcare system will gain from population-wide association studies and longitudinal patterns that can be learned from exhaustively quantified consumers.
As the earliest days of what many attendees, speakers and corporate entities at HLTH cautiously and hopefully referred to as the post-pandemic era, we sense the three overarching currents that we observed to be key drivers of the next phase of evolution in health and wellness.
(Oh, and we didn’t even bother seeing Ludacris. Sorry, Luda!)