Dec. 11, 2019
A new decade is upon us, and with it, new opportunities to deliver better care to patients and increase profitability. Here are the major trends that will impact doctors and patients over the next 10 years, according to reporting by the staff at HealthData Management.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology area with perhaps the greatest potential to positively impact medicine in the next decade. According to one estimate, the AI in health-care market is expected to grow worldwide with an estimated compound annual growth rate of more than 50 percent—reaching more than $127 billion by 2028.
Digital Health Tools
In the coming decade, providers will increasingly implement digital-health tools, enabling new methods and modalities to improve healthcare.
The implementation of remote patient monitoring by leveraging connected and wearable devices, sensors and trackers will be the platforms that gather patient-generated health data to facilitate disease management and patient engagement.
Imaging Technology
The promise of radiological imaging in healthcare in the next decade won’t be curtailed by technological limitations—resolutions are increasing, and viewing options will expand to include three-dimensional viewing, as well as augmented and virtual reality.
Data Sharing & Interoperability
Significant improvements in the exchange of patients’ clinical information should become a reality in the 2020s.
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A variety of factors will improve information exchange in the new decade. High among those are the maturation of HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, which in 2019 reached the normative stage. The widespread adoption of FHIR is expected to facilitate information exchange throughout the health-care universe.
Patient Communication and Engagement
Patients and clinicians generally want more communication and interaction, and technology is expected to help enable that in the 2020s.
Previous generations of physicians tended to want to place limits on enabling direct communications with patients. But now, familiarity with technology—and its potential to increase productivity and effectiveness—have increased provider willingness. And other factors are providing impetus as well.
Payer Evolution
Health-care payers will continue to see their roles in the health ecosystem change and shift in the new decade. That presages a whole different range of information technology needs that are vastly different from the systems they’ve used for years.
Value-based care is the impetus for the change. Payers are feeling the pressure to change their reimbursement criteria from paying providers for the quantity of services they provide to instead measuring value as the basis for payment.
Precision Medicine
Healthcare’s one-size-fits-all approach to treating patients will start to be replaced next decade with a personalized approach to medicine that focuses on individuals, giving clinicians and patients access to the kinds of information needed to create individually-tailored programs to treat a variety of diseases.
