Reenita Das | January 22, 2015
The Top 10 Trends Shaping the World of Healthcare
Every year I sit down with our team of healthcare futurists to carefully choose the right cards and place our bets on what we can expect to see in the coming year. It’s always both a terrifying and exciting experience because at the end of the year, you can always go back to validate what trends our team was able to key in on and the degree it shaped the events of that year, and, yes, even identify what might have caught us by surprise.
Without getting into a deep retrospective, unequivocally the rate and scale to which the Ebola pandemic spread was an unforeseen game-changer for 2014. In terms of predictions that came to pass, our team really was honed in on some of the major players that would become involved in mega multi-billion dollar M&A transactions, a trend that should continue into 2015. However, I believe there is plenty of time to look back at 2014. But for now, onwards into 2015. Here’s what you can expect this year.
• Landslide Acceptance of Private Exchanges
We expect growth of nearly 300% for 2015 in terms of the number of enrollees who will select their health plans through private healthcare exchanges. While Healthcare.gov and the clunky roll out of the public insurance exchange got all the attention in 2014, the real action is in the private exchanges. While reports of employers dropping healthcare benefits for their employees en masse following approval of the Affordable Care Act were more hype than reality, businesses are definitely looking at making significant changes to the types of plans and defined contributions they make available to their employees. Negotiating options through private exchanges is fast becoming one of their primary means to accomplish that goal. Serving approximately 2.5 million enrollees in 2014, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, many more businesses are expected to buy into the model over the coming years.
• Employers Incentivizing mHealth
As a carrot on the other end of the stick that is employers pushing a greater degree of the healthcare cost burden to its employees, we project as many as 70-80% of large businesses will soon or already provide employees vouchers or discounts for mHealth products and service platforms by the end of 2015. The obvious rationale behind these initiatives is that employers are hoping their employees will have greater awareness about their health and take more preventative measures to avoid more acute outcomes. For example, in 2014, energy giant BP America purchased 25,000 Fitbit devices for North American employees in order to encourage a healthier lifestyle.
• Consumers Spending Out of Pocket on Health & Wellness
Just this week (January 20), the FDA put out new guidance on where it believes the delineation exists between clinical wearables that fall under the regulatory scrutiny of its agency and those geared to more general well being and healthy living. It’s a preliminary guidance report that is not binding in its statements, but we believe this preliminary release speaks to the agency’s expectations for the explosion of new wearables that will be launched and used by consumers in 2015. We project consumer out-of-pocket spending on non-clinical health, wellness, and self-disease management technologies and services to grow by 60-70% from 2014. High-profile launches like the Apple AAPL +1.53% Watch and its hyped Health Kit are among a confluence of factors that make 2015 the year wearables and mHealth-centric applications reach significant mass.
Source: Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reenitadas/2015/01/22/healthcare-is-headed-down-a-new-road-with-new-rules-in-2015/