China, Apple and environmental factors affecting health outcomes will drive healthcare transformations in 2019, reports Isabelle Roughol, LinkedIn senior editor-at-large.
Here are three healthcare-related predictions for 2019:
1. Healthcare will address outside variables. Factors outside the physician's office that affect health outcomes are forcing healthcare companies to expand their reach. For instance, Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger started a "Fresh Food Farmacy" that offers patients groceries, nutrition information and cooking classes.
"If you're sitting at home with no job, it's going to impact your health, whether that's the mental stress, whether that starts to create high blood pressure, early signs of hypertension," said Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser-Permanente chairman and CEO Bernard Tyson.
2. Patient access to medical data will improve. Apple has moved to make medical records available on the iPhone, and other companies will likely follow its lead. Notably, Apple uses international Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standards for its Health app.
"I'd like us to get to the point where data is not seen as intellectual property," said American Medical Informatics Association President and CEO Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD. "If we don't have the ability to share data, you're going to stifle innovation."
3. China will drive changes in healthcare. Drugmakers forged partnerships with Chinese companies such as Ping An, Alibaba and Tencent in 2018. China is now the second-largest pharmaceuticals market, and it's taking a new approach to medicines that may facilitate the creation of new therapies.
"Our experiences there are going to drive how we reimagine health care," said Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan.
Click here for the full list of big ideas to watch in 2019.