"Trends in Healthcare" from HP

In today's post I'm summarizing the discussion from a HP webinar on "Trends in Healthcare" by Charlie West and Ellen Weize of HP. I found this webinar useful in capturing at a high-level the market, business and technology disruptions that will shape the payer landscape healthcare in the years to come.

The presenters identify the following pressures in the healthcare ecosystem that will define strategy in the coming years:

Emerging market looks significantly different than what payers are used to. Due to the individual mandate, Individuals will be entering the market who were never insured, or were under-insured. These customers are driving business disruption as payers need to develop strategies to win their business where the functional requirements for their products are different. There is also new payers in the market, as the health exchanges have helped auto, home insurance companies and banks and financial companies to enter the market. We're also likely to see many mergers and acquisitions in this environment. Combined to the greater competition in the market place are the additional burdens of Health care reform, such as decrease in medical loss ratio, that put pressure on payers to bring down administrative costs. But a number of technological advancement in Analytics, BI, cloud/virtualization, and mobile technology providers payers the ability to leverage technology disruption to provide better products and services.

The presenters conclude any payer IT strategy must involve a coordinated plan that is focused on survival into the next period and then plans to modernize and thrive in the new environment. For this healthcare companies will have to focus on Remediation projects such as 5010, ICD-10 migrations, etc. as well as modernize their infrastructure, outsourcing non-differentiators, create transparency to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, prospectively use data mining to address fraud and abuse, etc.

This road map from HP helps to identify some of the key trends and pressures that will face Healthcare CIOs in the near future.