MobiHealthNews reached out to executives from across the digital health landscape and questioned them about unexpected and impactful occurrences from the past year.
Leaders singled out the closing of retail clinics, challenges in the Medicare Advantage market, the FDA's concerns about off-label advertising, the wide variety of AI use cases and the plethora of uses for GLP-1s beyond weight management.
Matt Cybulsky, practice leader of healthcare AI, data and product innovation at LBMC
Surprising? More shocking, really. Walmart, Forward Health, Dollar General and Olive shut down their initiatives in the space. Some of our most heralded companies and all-star executives were left scratching their heads and engaging in throat-knotted RCAs (root cause analyses). If anything lies ahead after we review what we left behind with these shutdowns, it's an identification of what we're missing in these models.
Measuring how this impacts longitudinally will take years. Yet, one thing is clear – don't rush a product to market before rigorous testing in the face of our accelerating AI exuberance, as the public is waiting on us to trust the tools we put before them. That, to me, is the biggest risk to this movement – look at your failures, you'll get closer to what works that way.
Peter Bonis, MD, chief medical officer of Wolters Kluwer Health
While the discussion around healthcare was muted leading up to the 2024 election, we've quickly seen multiple themes emerge that will likely lead to important changes in healthcare with the new administration.
We saw challenges in the Medicare Advantage market, the retrenchment of retail health and the convergence of change enablers, such as the voiding of the Chevron Deference, discussion of a Department of Government Efficiency and new appointees across HHS, CDC, CMS and the FDA. We concurrently continue to see large investments in AI as the technology advances not only toward the prophesized state of artificial general intelligence (AGI) but the possibility that robotics will permit AGI to be corporeal.
Dr. Mitesh Rao, founder and CEO of OMNY Health
One of the most noteworthy events was the July CrowdStrike outage, which disrupted operations nationwide and caused chaos across multiple sectors, from grounded flights to overwhelmed hospitals. Health systems heavily rely on their technology infrastructure to provide safe and timely care, touching everything from scheduling and coordination software to safety and quality reporting platforms.
Dr. Michael Howell, chief clinical officer at Google
I was so excited that two of my fellow Googlers received a Nobel Prize this year! It was really clear to me that they deserved it – anyone who has ever read about Levinthal's Paradox understands a bit about how hard protein folding is, and anyone who has ever cared for a patient with a protein-folding problem knows how foundational proteins are to life, health and disease.
Hilary Hatch, chief clinical officer of Phreesia
A 2023 article radically reconsidering conventional wisdom about menopause got a lot of attention, but I didn't know if anything substantive would happen. I was shocked – in the best possible way – to see startups, investments and conversations about menopause. Yes, women over 50 are going to take over the world.
The attention to menopause has revealed an area of vast unmet need. There's still a long way to go, but 2024 gave us a glimpse into the future.
Brooke Boyarsky Pratt, CEO and cofounder of knownwell
Regulatory and Accessibility Challenges: Regulatory bodies like the FDA flagged concerns about off-label advertising, raising the stakes for manufacturers to ensure compliant marketing. Simultaneously, insurers faced pressure to widen coverage for GLP-1 therapies, highlighting accessibility as a critical issue in 2024.
Don Woodlock, head of global healthcare solutions at InterSystems
GenAI was always expected to be a natural fit for healthcare, but the rich variety of AI use cases out there exceeds what many predicted.
This rapid uptake has also presented unexpected challenges, notably concerns about patient privacy and over-reliance on AI for critical decisions. The scramble to establish ethical guidelines and regulations has been a significant, ongoing development. Healthcare professionals and regulators are trying to put in the proper safeguards for a technology that is rapidly advancing, creating scenarios that are hard to predict. The rapid adoption of GenAI in healthcare will lead to a "GenAI governance gap" in 2025.
Elliott Green, CEO and cofounder of Dandelion Health
I was surprised to see neither the healthcare or life sciences industries doubling down on their investments in AI this past year. Potentially more surprising, though, was the immense speed with which we saw research identify a plethora of adjacent uses for GLP-1s beyond weight management. As oral versions of these drugs become available with time, I expect even more exponential growth in the identification of other use cases for patients – as well as more research and data that can help empower a new era of precision medicine with GLP-1s and patients.
Laurent Martinot, CEO and cofounder of Sunrise
One of the biggest developments in the sleep health world is the growing evidence that the use of GLP-1s can help treat sleep apnea. Researchers have confirmed that weight loss is particularly beneficial for obese patients with sleep apnea, so looking ahead to 2025, I believe we will continue to see widespread use of anti-obesity medications as a major treatment for patients who struggle with obesity and sleep apnea.
Dickon Waterfield, president of Lantern, formerly Employer Direct Healthcare
Rising costs are ushering in a seismic shift in digital health. We're increasingly seeing employers evaluating and removing solutions that are not working. We've heard from employers who are cutting their offerings down from upwards of 20-point solutions to three or four.
We're also seeing employers become more restrictive with plan design choices to reduce overall healthcare spending – whether that's using a limited pharmacy network or being more prescriptive about sites of care. We're even seeing some employers requiring employees to use Lantern for certain healthcare procedures, which was previously presented as an option.
Hal Andrews, president and CEO of Trilliant Health
The biggest surprise is that Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress. The most noteworthy event that was a surprise is the warm reception from health policy analysts and health economy stakeholders for the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. History may not repeat, but it rhymes, and Washington, D.C., cannot seem to learn that cost-plus business models inevitably result in increasing costs.