New Market Intel Tools Tackle Disruptive Innovation

What’s New?

The AHA Center for Health Innovation has released a set of resources on disruptive innovation in the health care market designed to help leaders better understand new market entrants’ challenges to traditional business models and ways to respond to these developments. The tools focus on the major players disrupting health care, their strategies and what they may have in store for 2019.

What’s Happened This Year?

Much has changed over the past 12 months in the health care field. Early in the year, market entrants such as Google, Amazon and Apple launched various initiatives to better engage consumers in their health. Later, significant shifts occurred in vertical integration, with traditional health care businesses like insurers, providers and pharmacies merging under one corporate umbrella. Tracking all these moves, understanding the strategy and nuances behind the transactions and the implications for provider organizations, payers and others can be difficult.

How to Use the Tools

The center’s tools are designed to provide practical insights to help hospitals and health systems cut through the clutter. They include:

• An interactive timeline of some of the biggest moves in 2018 by health care’s leading disruptors and an overview of key players (both the well-known such as Amazon and the not-so-well-known such as Devoted Health).
• A framework for understanding the motivations of new market entrants, exploring business model innovations that hospitals can make to respond to new market entrants and the implications of vertical integration occurring within health care.
• A report on the rise of new market entrants and vertical integrators, and the 12 cultural attributes of organizations that are well-positioned to seize market opportunities.
• 20 key questions for health care executives and their leadership teams to test their strategies in response to changes brought about by big tech, startup firms, vertical integrators, new payers and virtual care providers.

What’s Next?

The AHA Center for Health Innovation plans to launch a series of new tools and resources beginning in 2019, with the first being a report on telehealth that will use AHA data on telehealth to illustrate trends across the country. That report will also gather and share leading practices for various telehealth use cases. Another report will take a deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence, exploring its impact on clinical decision making and the health care workforce. Other tools will be introduced throughout the year.