The population worldwide is aging. According to the UN, by 2050, one in six people in the world will be over the age of 65, up from one in 11 in 2019. Given that “aging” is a big and growing sector, it cannot be ignored by the software development industry. All efforts to address the aging economy and the needs of older people are called “Age-Tech.”
By analogy with “FinTech,” the term “Age-Tech” covers digital enablement of the longevity economy like FinTech shook up finance industry, including mobile payments, money transfers, loans, fundraising, asset management, etc.
“We can think of four categories of digital-enablement in Age-Tech: services purchased by older people; services purchased on behalf of older people; services traded between older and younger people; and services delivered to future older people,” says Dominic Endicott, venture capitalist and Age-Tech expert.
Whether it is a product aimed at increasing mental stimulation of our grannies or just an app to coordinate who of the family members will drive an older family member to a medical appointment, these experiences fall into the Age-Tech concept.
While news about vaccines is mostly dominated by COVID-19 right now, work is continuing to find a vaccine that can protect against different types of cancer. The latest development comes from Anixa Biosciences (ANIX:NASDAQ) and Cleveland Clinic, which has developed a breast cancer vaccine that could stop this deadly disease in its tracks.
After being in development for over a decade, the team has been given FDA approval to begin human trials, following a 100% success rate in animal trials. With breast cancer being the most common type of cancer in women worldwide, this news could have a positive outcome in the fight against the disease, as well as other types of cancer.
Breast cancer rates continue to grow worldwide
Breast cancer rates are continuing to grow, with more than 2 million cases reported every year. Survival rates have continued to improve over the years, with the five-year survival rate for a stage 1 or 2 breast cancer diagnosis being 80% and 90% in some parts of the world.
Work is ongoing to develop new treatments and a potential cure, whereas another approach has been to develop a vaccine that could prevent cancer from developing in the first place.
By Ken Perez, vice president of healthcare policy, Omnicell, Inc.
Ken Perez
A record 158 million Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election, a staggering increase of 17% versus 2016. Joe Biden garnered 81.3 million votes, while Donald Trump received 74.2 million—both more than any U.S. presidential candidate in history. In the Electoral College, Biden received 306 votes, while Trump got 236.
In the U.S. Senate Georgia runoff elections, Democrat Jon Ossoff defeated Republican incumbent David Perdue, 50.5% to 49.5%, and Democrat Raphael Warnock prevailed over Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, 50.9% to 49.1%.
The Democrats’ sweep of the two Georgia runoff elections resulted in a 50-50 split between the Democrats and the Republicans in the Senate. Because Vice President Kamala Harris serves as president of the Senate and holds the tie-breaking vote, the Democrats are the majority party in the upper chamber, allowing Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to become the Senate Majority Leader and giving the Democrats the chairmanships of the Senate’s 24 current committees.
In the House, the Republicans registered a net gain of 11 seats, narrowing the Democratic majority to 10 seats. Currently, the Democrats have 221 representatives, the Republicans have 211, and there are three vacancies.
With Biden’s win, the Democrats’ sweep of the U.S. Senate Georgia runoff elections, and the Democrats’ retention of their majority in the House, the Democrats have control of the White House and majorities in both chambers of Congress for the first time since 2010.
As for the judicial branch, with Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation by the Senate on Oct. 26, 2020, there are six conservatives and three liberals on the Supreme Court.
Citing former President Barack Obama’s famous triumphal statement in 2009, “Elections have consequences,” many Democrats view their control of both the executive and legislative branches as a clear mandate to aggressively pursue their agenda. Some from the progressive wing of the Democratic party are urging Biden to “go big” and use his “honeymoon” period to drive his most aggressive reforms, including a public option plan, expanding Medicaid, enhancing the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces, lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, and promoting unionization and collective bargaining for healthcare workers.
Others, including moderate Democrats, advocate pursuit of a less-ambitious, more moderate bipartisan agenda, including reversal of many of former President Donald Trump’s executive orders, supporting telehealth, promoting value-based care and alternative payment models, increasing price transparency, and somehow tackling prescription drug prices.
Whether the aggressive or moderate scenario will come to pass will be largely determined by several factors.
First is the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. In Biden’s inauguration speech, he rightly said, “Our work begins with getting COVID under control.” It is job one for the Biden administration for 2021 and perhaps 2022. It is not an overstatement to say that most everything—the nation’s public health, economic recovery, and the political climate in the nation’s capital—hinges on the success of the coronavirus vaccine rollout.
When I wrote about megatrends last year, the predictions were, naturally, forward-looking. Telehealth, for example, was important because of increased healthcare consumerism and the convergence of technologies to make its use quick and easy for payers, providers and patients.
Now when I look at telehealth as one of several 2021 megatrends, it’s tinged by the coronavirus pandemic. Rather than telehealth being a nice-to-have in 2020 with adoption over time, the service has become a necessity needed in real-time caused by the pandemic’s social distancing mandate and the highly communicable nature of the virus.
Each 2021 megatrend has the pandemic front and center. The pandemic exposed many issues facing the healthcare industry. Challenges and problems that weren’t a surprise, but simply rose to the top astonishingly quickly as the healthcare industry responded to the pandemic. The pandemic is and will continue to propel many analytics challenges and needs throughout healthcare.
Coronavirus sets the stage
Now that we’ve established the pandemic as the dominant megatrend across healthcare businesses worldwide, we’re going to take a deeper look at the pandemic’s impact on the industry: payers and providers, members and patients.
As COVID-19 rapidly descended, many different types of organizations changed to partial or fully remote workforce operations and took necessary measures to preserve the safety and health of employees. After securing operations, organizations quickly started to understand how they could help clients navigate the pandemic.
Much of the work in healthcare IT (HIT) was shaped by COVID-19. We wanted to help payers and providers understand the impact of the pandemic on business, financial and clinical outcomes to help healthcare remain viable for the many people working for the organizations or receiving care.
The following are 2021’s healthcare megatrends.
Telehealth goes mainstream as the new normal
The first major pandemic-propelled trend that everyone is talking about is increased telehealth usage. Many of us, my family included, began seeing our doctors online for the first time because of the pandemic.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported a staggering change for Medicare and Medicaid populations. Telehealth use was 0.1% of overall health services in January 2020, but by April it had increased to 45.9% of utilization. (Telehealth use by Medicare and Medicaid patients later decreased to 20%.)
Meanwhile, Definitive Healthcare reported in June 2020 that 33 percent of inpatient hospitals offered telehealth in 2019. By June 2020 that was up to 75%; another staggering increase. We see telehealth here to stay after COVID-19 is controlled. Utilization likely will come down from current pandemic levels, but industry analysts almost universally predict telehealth adoption will remain high as mainstream patients adopt and become comfortable with the technology. (Last year, an increase in the use of telehealth was one of our megatrends, though for different reasons.)
By Ashley Joseph, senior director of client services, Infusion at LeanTaaS.
Ashley Joseph
Each new year brings about the opportunity to reflect, learn and welcome positive change in our personal lives. This ideology is also embraced by the healthcare industry, as we’re constantly looking to improve workflows and incorporate new technology to boost patient care and operational efficiency.
To say the healthcare industry has learned a lot from 2020 would be a drastic understatement. As we enter 2021, we have an opportunity to make improvements to the vulnerabilities exposed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Infusion centers (and their patients) were forced to get creative “on the fly” in 2020. With the new year officially here, we expect to see more change and creativity from infusion centers around the country, in response to yet more new challenges.
Infusion centers may expand their scope
In the past, infusion centers have had occasional times when a chair or two was used for non-oncology treatments. Now, we’re seeing these various treatments pop up in centers more frequently, especially some COVID-19 treatments like monoclonal antibody infusions used to treat coronavirus patients. This not only increases the scarcity of chair resources, but also creates issues around trying to treat COVID-19 patients in the same vicinity as severely immunocompromised patients.
Process bottlenecks may come from new sources
Infusion chairs have traditionally been the limiting factor in how many patients can be treated per day. Today, though, nursing shortages are just as likely to be the limiting asset. These shortages are caused by unexpected, COVID-induced early retirements, quarantines required due to COVID-19 exposure, and the fact that infusion nurses are highly skilled – and thus among those who can easily provide support in inpatient units when those units experience sudden or unexpected nursing shortages.
Some centers have been forced to create/section off infusion areas for cancer patients who have also tested positive for COVID-19. Every time that the overall pool of available infusion chairs needs to be segmented such that any patient can’t go into any chair, efficiency in the center overall will decline.
The challenges and tragedies of the past year are well-known, but amidst the hardships of 2020 some hopeful signals have emerged in healthcare. Patients and the people and systems who care for them have been forced to do things differently this year, and many of these experiments will be with us to stay. These are some trends that will strengthen and take shape in 2021.
#1 Stakeholders embrace asynchronous
Payors, providers and other industry stakeholders who may have been reluctant to engage with async models in the past have been won over in 2020. The pandemic accelerated the understanding that async can safely and efficiently care for patients at scale. Providers who waded into async out of necessity during Covid have found that it allows for less rushed, more direct communication with patients that in many cases results in better care, while increasing provider flexibility and quality of life. Payors are realizing telehealth offers smart savings compared to legacy systems. State laws are coming along too — in May Maryland changed legislation allowing for asynchronous telemedicine to be accepted, and we expect more states to modernize in this way.
#2 Decrease of PCP as gatekeeper
Today’s young adults were already less likely than those of previous generations to have a primary care provider, and this trend will grow as PCPs close practices and people grow accustomed to a la carte care. Circumstances of 2020 have led people to get care formerly channeled through a primary provider directly, in a diverse array of settings. Covid swabs at drive-through clinics, flu shots at supermarket pharmacies, and prescription medications through telehealth, combined with increased utilization of home monitoring devices and wearables, have transformed patients (for better or worse) into their own care coordinators.
For years, health IT stakeholders and industry associations have stressed the importance of high-quality patient matching and data standardization in achieving the goals of the Triple Aim. While efforts for a national strategy have stalled, in part because of the government’s ban on universal identifiers, endeavors to improve patient identification at scale are mounting.
Last November, Senator Maggie Hassan petitioned the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to develop policies for standardized address data given the importance of accurate patient demographics in this ongoing pandemic.
Since then, action has been forthcoming, not only by the ONC but also by the federal government and other private sector organizations who have come together to address the clear need for a unified standard around patient address data. In December, ONC announced their intention to develop a unified specification for a critical component in patient matching—address data.
This new initiative, known as Project US@, will formally launch later this month and help health officials and experts establish consistency around formatting patient addresses. Here are three things you should know about Project US@:
Medical debt is one of the many painful and confusing problems of the modern U.S. healthcare system. While care solutions develop and improve, costs only seem to go up along with the confusion faced by many patients. But can new preventative health technologies offer a reprieve from these high costs and corresponding debt?
As millions of Americans struggle with bills, especially in the wake of the pandemic, technology is here to help. Remote healthcare and cloud data innovations are creating a variety of solutions from the safety of home — even the U.S medical debt crisis.
The Unfortunate Reality of Medical Debt
Before the pandemic even struck, 137 million Americans were struggling with medical debt. Individuals and families alike find it all but impossible to meet their financial obligations to the healthcare industry and the result is negative for both patients and providers. With nearly half the total U.S. population facing medical payment difficulties, the question must be asked how we got here and what we can do about it.
