Top Five Themes from This Year’s AHIP Institute

Attending the AHIP annual conference is always a good opportunity to foster relationships with our current clients and to hear from thought leaders about where the industry is today and where it’s headed going forward. While overall attendance appeared down at this year’s event in San Diego, I thought the content and speakers were top notch compared to previous years and came away with some great highlights from the event.

Of the sessions I attended, there were five core themes that stood out:

1. B2B models will become increasingly extinct as the market moves toward B2C.
Health care has entered an era of disruption on many fronts, including a focus on the end user/consumer/patient who was once somewhat ignored. Demand has increasingly grown from patient advocates and others (including our work with What’s the Fix?) for people to be put at the center of everything in health care – and the industry is beginning to listen. I was pleased to see that existing and, in some cases, very old industry norms are beginning to give way to powerful market forces. As the political climate has changed and the national discourse become more consumer focused; the old incentive models are changing. As plans, providers and employers continue to integrate the previous value chain is by necessity pivoting toward B2C models.

2. Embracing disruption is the new path forward for all companies desiring to be relevant and profitable.
Emergent technologies, consumer expectations and escalating health care costs are driving disruption and new companies are entering to challenge the status quo.

3. Interoperability of information is accelerating.
Data sets are disconnected today but when the connection begins to take shape, including cross industry data sets, the opportunities will be substantial in shaping and changing health care and interaction with consumers.

4. Focus needs to be on frictionless business interactions.
Health care legacy systems weren’t built to support rapid and robust expansion. Technology-based partnerships allow networks to grow faster and into more ecosystems than ever before. The outcome will be more seamless back office administration and better customer experience and service.

5. Consumer experience is/should be a core business focus.
The consumer should be the sole focus of companies. Whether it be the consumer’s user experience, how their data is secured or what privacy means for consumers in the future.

If I had to pick a favorite session, it would be Chris Dancy’s “Privacy, Data, and Personalization in 2030.”  (For more background on Chris do a google search for ‘most connected man’.) His session was definitely the most thought provoking. For years, he has been tracking his life and interaction with digital devices. He dove into how people will interact and use data moving forward and how the concept of ‘privacy’ is most likely flexible and people will become more conditioned to be so given a “convenience addiction.”

I left San Diego feeling proud of how well HealthSparq is positioned to deliver on the themes above. Our tools and services are focused on helping consumer making smarter decisions and our expanded focus on leveraging data to personalize and augment the user experience is right in line with where our space needs to go.