USA Healthcare: predicted trends 2015 (Part 2)

“Health care delivery will be revolutionized by 1990, with most large metropolitan areas having implemented vertically-integrated health facilities coordinated by computer… [including] physicians’ offices, neighborhood health care centers, hospitals, university medical centers, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and home health care.” - a quote from 1978 by Gideon Gartner, one of the godfathers of the market research industry which I found in a Forbes article from December 2014. A failed prediction so far… But not to worry. End of the year or start of the year we get flooded with predictions; of course, healthcare could not avoid this pandemic. Some are your garden variety common sense predictions and bring nothing new to the table. Others are way too speculative to bring anything of value to the table... We have compiled a list of what we think is more than common sense but more than simple fantasy (in order of probability): mobile healthcare, proactive healthcare paradigm shift, physician extenders and gene mapping.
Today we talk about the proactive healthcare.

Switching to proactive vs. reactive healthcare

Every experienced drunkard knows the simple truth that to prevent is far easier than to correct; the reason why they learn to act rather deliberately when under the weather. US Healthcare is coming to accept this simple truth, albeit rather slowly. As we saw above, PwC thinks that mobile apps and various wearables (such as fitness bands or health monitors) will give significantly accelerate the process of shifting towards prevention and thus reduce costs. Good news for those keeping fit as it is also predicted that this will imply lesser costs in terms insurance. A lot of the top health risks for the US population - smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, and inactivity - could be countered at a fraction of the cost of an intervention.

Given many american adults cannot be trusted to look after their own long-term health and well-being but can be trusted to check many times an hour their smartphones, many experts feel that this may be the solution to prevention. A rather doubtful overgeneralization, but it does seem to work for a lot of addicted-to-smartphone people. Even for those it does not apply to, your doctor or health insurance company can require you to grant them access to such data if you want to pay less.

This, of course, depends on whether healthcare organisations can get Big Data running and analyzing. It also depends on the acceptance rates of all sorts of medical diagnosis apps, which so far is very low. Most doctors think that mobile apps should confine themselves to dietary, fitness and keeping people informed, as the picture shows below.

What do you think of this prediction? Send us the probability you will assign for it happen and will publish it below. 10%? 50% ?100%? Let us know!