The start of the new year is a great time to consider the trends of the last year and look forward to what will come in 2022. The healthcare system certainly saw its fair share of disruption and innovation during 2020 and 2021. What will 2022 bring? Here are Silver Fern’s predictions for five trends that will accelerate in 2022.
Expanded coverage and uptake of precision food programs/prescriptions. All evidence points to the importance of healthy food access and meal planning for improved management of chronic disease. The proliferation of pre-packaged meals and meal-prep delivery services over the last decade has seen a more recent expansion into precision and prescription food services that are geared toward the management and prevention of common lifestyle-related diseases, like type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Many of these players, like Nutrition for Longevity are largely plant-based, with a focus on science-backed meal plans and ingredients. Insurance companies and self-funded employers are starting to take notice of the improved health outcomes and reduced downstream costs achieved by these services, and we can expect to see more partnerships between these companies and payers as well as expanded coverage of them for members in 2022.
Access to care via telehealth and digital health. Improving patients’ access to care has consistently been a key challenge of the healthcare system. The pandemic further punctuated the importance of aligning available healthcare resources with communities’ fluctuating needs and the limitations of the system to adapt quickly to changing resource demands. The pandemic also illuminated that access can be enhanced through effective forms of virtual care and remote patient monitoring, including more frequent synchronous and asynchronous touch points with patients. In 2022, we expect a continued trend towards organizations optimizing telehealth – supported by policy and regulation changes from CMS and other governing bodies – and digital health strategies for optimizing patient care, particularly chronic disease management which necessitates more frequent touchpoints and higher patient engagement over the long haul compared to acute medical conditions.
Continued adoption of whole–person and value-based care (VBC) models. A recent report by Forrester predicts that VBC models will become the dominant payment approach in the next decade. “The industry has been beating the drum on value-based care for some time, but major hurdles prevented a significant number of providers from fully embracing its potential. However, the analysts argue that shifts to home care and preventive care, as well as changes to the labor force, enable far greater adoption,” says the report in Fierce Healthcare. We predict that this trend will continue in 2022 as the availability and integration of new sources of data improve and as innovative digital health players have time to demonstrate that their preventive care and chronic disease services yield returns in long-term cost savings and improvements in population health.
Personalization of care. The trend toward personalization has been evident across many industries, including social media, retail, and higher education. Consumer expectations of healthcare are changing. They want more personal connection with providers and a higher quality of services. Higher expectations, coupled with a willingness to “shop” for alternatives, has driven a stronger focus on patient engagement across the industry. Effective personalization in the chronic disease space requires understanding each individual’s journey with chronic disease, as well as their personal behaviors, barriers, goals, and treatment preferences. In 2022, we believe healthcare will continue to trend toward personalization, but industry players will carefully weigh the impact on care delivery time, resources, and overall costs. They will be looking for partners and engagement strategies that offer higher personalization within existing workflows and applications, and they’ll want proof that personalization initiatives will lead to improved health outcomes without increasing complexity.
Investments and innovation in healthcare digitization and AI. Nearly every element of healthcare is experiencing recent and continued technological innovation as established and emerging players try to wrangle ever-expanding data points and digital tools to create better healthcare products and services. Among the Forbes list of healthcare tech trends for 2022, is making sense of medical data with AI and machine learning. Although we also predict AI investments will continue, we believe these initiatives in the area of chronic disease management and prevention will struggle to demonstrate the outcomes achieved by clinician-led or clinician-managed interventions. The industry’s hopes for AI to shortcut patient interactions is not necessarily aligned with patient preferences for more personalized care. And these tools have a long way to go before they can demonstrate anything close to the sophistication of trained care professionals.
At Silver Fern, we’ve been evolving our assessment and data solutions to meet the changing needs of healthcare businesses, including payers, care management companies, digital health players, and healthcare software companies tackling whole person care. We’ve added asynchronous delivery of assessments to improve access and make personalization of care easy and effective without impacting care team workflows. We’ve added bulk surveying options enabling quick access to actionable data that can further enhance population interventions and predictive modeling. Keeping care teams at the center of care, our products promote the highly personalized interactions that result in education and sustained engagement, driving improved patient health outcomes. In 2022, we look forward to new partnerships with digital health companies and innovative players in the precision food space, and we plan to further evolve our products to make sure they are efficient, accessible, and effective.
What are your plans for 2022?