2024 Healthcare Insights: Navigating AI, Telehealth, and Policy Challenges
ABIG Health has reimagined its biweekly newsletter to give you more in-depth information on the hottest topics in healthcare. Our goal is to keep you abreast of the latest research, healthcare news, commentary, and public perception regarding the challenges you, as healthcare innovators and leaders, are trying to tackle.
We hope you will find even more value in this new format — and that you will continue the conversation with us and our community on social. Follow us on LinkedIn and X (the platform previously … and still known … as Twitter.) And, of course, get in touch if you need more in-depth advice about healthcare business and investment strategy, operations management, or marketing and communications.
Time to double down on AI investment
Readers of this newsletter know that ABIG Health is all in on artificial intelligence, or AI … as long as policymakers get serious about creating guardrails.
Why? One reason is that, as new research suggests, this tool could help address social determinants of health or the factors that keep certain populations of people from living longer, healthier lives. As a Jan. 11 Stat News piece explained, “large language models like ChatGPT could benefit both patients and providers: by automatically extracting a patient’s social needs” — their housing, transportation, financial, and community support demands, for example — “from reams of text in their clinical records.”
Health equity is not the only problem AI could help solve. Clinicians are turning to AI to enhance patient safety and even to determine which strains of infectious diseases could become dominant. We do know the technology is not perfect. As MedPage Today noted, a recent study in JAMA Pediatrics found ChatGPT version 3.5 incorrectly diagnosed 83 out of 100 pediatric cases.
Our BIG Thought: Where there are challenges, there are opportunities. Hospitals, practices, and investors who are not trying to find ways to incorporate AI, drive it forward, or shape AI-related public policy will be doing patients (and their bottom line) a disservice.
Telehealth deserves a second look
With the “official” COVID-19 pandemic public health emergency in the rearview mirror, it is tempting to think telehealth is “so 2020.”
Those assessments are premature.
Americans do seem to prefer face-to-face interactions with their docs, but a new study suggests telehealth could help address one problem that plagues our healthcare system: Patients’ inability to make a follow-up visit.
As Healthcare Dive reported on Jan. 10, a new study by Epic Research found that, for most specialties, telehealth visits are more likely to result in a follow-up appointment than in-person care.
Healthcare Dive also noted, “Studies have shown telehealth could help patients more easily receive needed care, especially for mental healthcare and substance use disorder treatment.
Rural patients could also benefit from using virtual care to reduce long travel times to nearby healthcare facilities.”
Our BIG Thought: Lack of follow-up care is one of the top factors that lead to hospital readmissions. If telehealth can be used to put even a small dent in this problem, it could result in significant healthcare savings, not to mention better patient outcomes.
Election 2024:
Going into Election 2024, the Kaiser Family Foundation healthcare tracking poll revealed that about half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford healthcare costs, and one in four say they or a family member in their household had problems paying for healthcare in the past year.
One in four adults say that in the past 12 months, they have skipped or postponed getting the healthcare they needed because of the cost.
About four in ten insured adults worry about affording their monthly health insurance premium, and 48% worry about affording their deductible before health insurance kicks in.
41% of adults report having debt due to medical or dental bills. Debts are owed to credit cards, collections agencies, family and friends, banks, and other lenders. A disproportionate share of Black and Hispanic adults, women, parents, those with low incomes, and uninsured adults say they have health care debt.
About half of adults would be unable to pay an unexpected medical bill of $500 without going into debt.
Even grimmer news: On Jan. 11, Politico argued Election 2024 will be marked by a “lack of novel ideas” regarding healthcare.
Our BIG Thought: Without big ideas from policymakers, the private sector must step up and provide innovative solutions to these persistent problems. Companies that do so — while putting patients before profit — will win this year, and the next … and the next.
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