It was great being at #HLTH2024 this week, the largest healthcare innovation conference in the U.S. We were there to learn, share insights from our most recent #FuturistReport, and engage with attendees at our VSP Vision Care booth. Here are a few things I saw 👀 , heard👂 , and said 🎤 ...
👀: The past few years, I felt as though it was relatively easy to identify patterns while walking the conference floor. Whether it was through recurring panel insights or just the sheer volume of shared positioning and value propositions from the exhibitors, trends seemed to emerge pretty quickly. (The rise of women's health! Mental health's graduation from fringe benefit to default discretionary offering! At-home care!) This year, however, I'm still trying to piece the puzzle together. The more I reflect on a rather disparate show floor and diverse content set, the more I'm wondering if ~that's~ actually the trend. The unbundling of centralized care into various care models - at-home, hybrid, etc. - and the spike in focused specialities have enabled more convenience and choice for patients and, often times, better experiences and outcomes. But it's also birthed a rather noisy and hard-to-navigate ecosystem. I heard over and over again about the point solution fatigue patients/consumers are feeling as a result of this influx of care options and tools and I wonder if a consolidation of shared solutions is inevitable / impending.
👂: I have a notebook full of quotes/insights from various panels, but my favorite came from Snezana Mahon, Pharm.D., Chief Operating Officer with Transcarent. When asked to share her vision and hope for benefits & healthcare in 5-10 years, she talked about how most of us in the room not only took an Uber from the airport to the conference, but we had the option to select the kind of car, the price tier, the music we wanted to listen to, whether we'd want to have a conversation or not, and more. And that was her vision, that "we, patients, have complete control of the entire healthcare experience."
🎤: I was able to share our #FutureofSenses Futurist Report on the Tech Talk stage on Monday, offering five key trends for how sensory-based innovations and technologies are paving the way for a new era of human experience. It was an engaged audience, but I saw a lot of heads nod while I was discussing sense-based diagnostics and how the heightened relationship between our senses and the brain have unlocked an explosion of cognitive screenings and testings. To bring the trend to life, we were able to direct attendees to RetiSpec's booth, a startup that is applying AI to a retinal scan for the early detection of Alzheimer's.
Lastly, shout out to Photon Health, who definitely had the best booth at the conference. They recreated a mock Blockbuster, with a hidden door opening to a living room, to show how they're taking a Netflix-like approach to an antiquated industry (prescription drug e-commerce).
