Market Insights: 10 Predictions for Hospitals and Systems in 2019

What’s New?

A newly released Market Insights report from the AHA Center for Health Innovation presents 10 predictions for next year that hospitals and health systems should consider as they prepare for another year of transformative change. Each prediction relates to one or more of the Center’s focus areas, including: affordability and value, innovation capacity, new payment and delivery models, performance improvement, population health and emerging issues. This report follows on the heels of a set of resources the center released earlier in December to help provider organizations convert some of the challenges posed by new health care market entrants and vertical integrators into opportunities to better serve their patients and communities.

Looking Ahead

The predictions, which include insights based on input from a dozen top hospital and health system executives and consultants in the health care field, address such issues as how health plans and other payers will impact ambulatory care competition. Other predictions address trends like the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, where hospital and health system realignment is headed, and how social determinants of health will increasingly become the focus of population health-management efforts.

Among the predictions for 2019 from the experts:

• Hospitals and health systems will adopt formal digital health strategies to meet consumer expectations and to compete with some of the end-to-end digital disruption being created by technology companies like Apple and such retailers as Amazon, Walgreens and Walmart.
• More hospitals and health systems will offer hospital-at-home services to patients, thanks to remote-monitoring capabilities.
• Two-sided risk in value-based reimbursement models will become the norm in payer contracts.

By the Numbers

In addition to offering predictions, this report provides important contextual data from sources in the field that address transformation issues like adoption of AI, spending on home-health care services and the top target area for hospital and health system financial experts for reducing operation expenses in 2019.