Here’s a confession: I am much better at writing end-of-year review stories than I am at looking into the crystal ball for preview pieces at the beginning of the year. I might be able to make educated guesses about which issues we will be writing about in the coming year, but I prefer leave predictions about what is actually going to happen to others.
Luckily, people braver and more knowledgeable than I am are willing to weigh in. For instance, Dave Levin, M.D., chief medical officer of Sansoro Health recently shared his predictions for 2019 with Healthcare Informatics. One of his predictions is that “the excitement around new health IT players like Apple and Amazon will fade in late 2019. We need fresh ideas, but in the short-term, expect disappointments and missteps. Health IT (and healthcare in general) is much harder than it looks and the winners in the long-run will master the mash-up of the best of old and new. Health IT history is littered with companies like these that underestimate this challenge.” Good point!
Dave’s company, Sansoro Health, provides a set of APIs that read and write to EHRs. One of its investors is Boston-based LRVHealth, and one of LRVHealth’s general partners is Keith Figlioli, who served as senior vice president of healthcare informatics at Premier Inc. for nearly a decade. In December I spoke with Keith about some of his predictions for 2019.
One is that capital will be less abundant for digital health startups in 2019. I asked him why he thought that would be the case. “There already is a tremendous amount of capital in this space, including capital coming from other industries. The threat is that capital could be less abundant,” Figlioli said. “We are starting to see earlier stage companies have a little harder time raising capital. What that signals to us is that the greater market is pushing capital to later stages. Because capital can be harder to get in earlier rounds, valuations tend to float down a bit. The other thing is that the greater macro economy does feel like things are shifting a bit and that will also have an effect. I think 2019 may be a peaking year for valuations. I don’t think we are going to go much higher than we are right now.”
While Dave Levin had predicted that the enthusiasm about outside disruption from Big Tech might fade by the end of 2019, Figlioli predicted that these emerging entrants will start showing their cards. “Some of these guys are fairly secretive in their moves, but Apple has been hiring in healthcare and Amazon acquired PillPack. My sense is that we are going to know more about the ones that have been secretive,” he said. Now that the CVS/Aetna deal is done they will start to reveal more, he added. “We are going to see more announcements from these players over the course of 2019. People will be able to start deciphering what their plans are, at least out of the gate.” With its leadership in place, the Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway/JP Morgan entity will reveal an initiative, he predicted.
He also noted that Walgreens made some strategic announcements in 2018. “I call them the sleeping giant now, because CVS and Aetna made all the noise with their purchase deal. But Walgreens is making some very calculated moves with the incumbent players.”
Figlioli predicts that in 2019 the pace will pick up again on value-based care activity. “At LRVHealth, we have a saying that value-based care is inevitable but it is gradual,” he said. “I think we are finally going to get back up on the hamster wheel with things that really matter, because it feels like we have basically been at a dead stop since Trump took office.” He expects to see a handful of new mandatory and voluntary programs across cancer, cardiac and new bundled payment models. “When [HHS Secretary] Azar came in, it revved the engine back up and he is talking very publicly about ramping up mandatory programs. I think another signal is him talking more about CMMI [the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation] and what may come out of it in terms of social determinants of health. I think we will see one or two CMMI pilots in 2019 dedicated to social determinants.”
In a related prediction, he said we should expect to see community programs such as local food banks become more closely affiliated with healthcare providers and payers. And just as there have been startups in the transportation area of social determinants, expect to see a few food-as-medicine related startups emerge in 2019, he added.
Figlioli’s final prediction touches on something I have written about a few times, the new “app store” approach to EHR add-ons. With open APIs gradually becoming the norm, he said, more CIOs who will become comfortable layering best-of-breed applications on top.
“There has been this lure in the CIO suite to say that the EHR vendor is going to do everything. But because of what Cerner and Epic are doing and what athena has done all along, we are finally getting to a place where the average CIO is going to going to be OK going back to more of a hybrid model.” He stressed that the core EHR is not going anywhere. “You can think about them the same way you do about ERP systems. Over the last five years there has been a proliferation of overlays on top of them. And I feel like we are finally going to get to that with the EHR. It is not going to be clean or easy. There are going to be issues. It is going to be a pretty messy situation depending on how FHIR gets implemented. But it will become more of a cultural norm that Epic and Cerner don’t have to do everything. CIOs will say, ‘we are OK with them being our core workflow tool, but now we are allowing an overlay to take place.’”
