2021: The Year Broken Health Care Systems Begin the Healing Process

The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t break healthcare. It just brought to high relief the existing fractures. This is good, because those fracture lines become the map and roadways for where we in health care innovation need to focus our efforts. And having the failures of our systems be so obvious is giving set-in-their-ways health systems, payors and technology providers impetus to do the hard but necessary work to retool our systems and processes. Think of Covid-19 as an industry disruptor of the biggest kind.

So what did we learn from 2020 that we can apply in 2021? How will 2021 be different?

The Covid pandemic accelerated several trends; from telemedicine, to consumerism, to awareness of health equity, to new models for behavioral health. The health care environment in 2021 is poised to create new models and technologies to address these trends, should it so choose.

What these trends have in common is that they reflect an urgent need to re-evaluate how we deliver the right care, at the right time, in the right place. This will only come about when interests are aligned between payors, providers and patients via value-based care. During the pandemic, insurance companies took in premiums and paid out much less than normal, enriching their coffers at the expense of health systems. It made it clear that fee-for-service models need to go, and now health systems have the incentive to retool their processes to make value-based care work. Putting the right health care in the right place, at the right time is now the priority.

In our work at the Digital Innovation Group at Providence, we create partnerships with health systems, technology providers and payors to develop innovations that actually address the real issues. To that end, we think of innovation approaches to these challenges in four distinct buckets: Distributed care for access and convenience; navigation and personalization; helping marginal and traditionally underserved populations; and scaling behavioral health.