Health IT Continues To Drive Healthcare Leaders’ Agenda

A new study laying out opportunities, challenges and issues in healthcare likely to emerge in 2018 demonstrates that health IT is very much top of mind for healthcare leaders.

The 2018 HCEG Top 10 list, which is published by the Healthcare Executive Group, was created based on feedback from executives at its 2017 Annual Forum in Nashville, TN. Participants included health plans, health systems and provider organizations.

The top item on the list was “Clinical and Data Analytics,” which the list describes as leveraging big data with clinical evidence to segment populations, manage health and drive decisions. The second-place slot was occupied by “Population Health Services Organizations,” which, it says, operationalize population health strategy and chronic care management, drive clinical innovation and integrate social determinants of health.

The list also included “Harnessing Mobile Health Technology,” which included improving disease management and member engagement in data collection/distribution; “The Engaged Digital Consumer,” which by its definition includes HSAs, member/patient portals and health and wellness education materials; and cybersecurity.

Other hot issues named by the group include value-based payments, cost transparency, total consumer health, healthcare reform and addressing pharmacy costs.

So, readers, do you agree with HCEG’s priorities? Has the list left off any important topics?

In my case, I’d probably add a few items to list. For example, I may be getting ahead of the industry, but I’d argue that healthcare AI-related technologies might belong there. While there’s a whole separate article to be written here, in short, I believe that both AI-driven data analytics and consumer-facing technologies like medical chatbots have tremendous potential.

Also, I was surprised to see that care coordination improvements didn’t top respondents’ list of concerns. Admittedly, some of the list items might involve taking coordination to the next level, but the executives apparently didn’t identify it as a top priority.

Finally, as unsexy as the topic is for most, I would have thought that some form of health IT infrastructure spending or broader IT investment concerns might rise to the top of this list. Even if these executives didn’t discuss it, my sense from looking at multiple information sources is that providers are, and will continue to be, hard-pressed to allocate enough funds for IT.

Of course, if the executives involved can address even a few of their existing top 10 items next year, they’ll be doing pretty well. For example, we all know that providers‘ ability to manage value-based contracting is minimal in many cases, so making progress would be worthwhile. Participants like hospitals and clinics still need time to get their act together on value-based care, and many are unlikely to be on top of things by 2018.

There are also problems, like population health management, which involve processes rather than a destination. Providers will be struggling to address it well beyond 2018. That being said, it’d be great if healthcare execs could improve their results next year.

Nit-picking aside, HCEG’s Top 10 list is largely dead-on. The question is whether will be able to step up and address all of these things. Fingers crossed!

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

2 Comments

  • You’ve done a great job of assessing the HCEG Top 10 list. I agree that other items – like AI-driven data analytics and consumer-facing technologies like medical chatbots – are very promising. I suppose those executives who ranked these items may be a bit more reserved in their adoption of more leading-edge technologies.

    I find Item #2, “Population Health Services Organizations,” interesting in that many good technologies exist and must be “operationalized” to a finer degree – particularly in the area of social determinants of health.

    In regards to “health IT infrastructure spending or broader IT investment,” I think what you say may be more applicable to healthcare providers than health plans or large health systems with greater overall budgets.

    To be sure, I don’t think you’re ‘nit-picking.’ The HCEG Top 10 is a list of “Opportunities, Challenges and Issues” so it’s reasonable to expect variation and likelihood many will not be addressed in a year’s time. Some “issue items” will become challenges and take years to be implemented before their opportunity is realized.

    http://hceg.org/healthcare-leaders-select-and-rank-their-top-10-challenges-for-2018/

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