It’s been an eventful year in healthcare news to say the least.
From major mergers and acquisitions to continued Covid-era policies and coverage requirement changes, 2023 kept us (and our readers) busy. And the rash of healthcare-related news is expected to continue in 2024.
Ahead of the new year, Healthcare Brew asked various industry leaders and observers for their predictions on what trends may emerge and how new technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI), could shape the health sector in 2024. Here’s what they told us:
Health companies and hospital systems will embrace new AI-enabled software and capabilities, albeit slowly.
Mary Mulcare, the chief medical officer for health tech platform Summus, said she expects AI-powered technology to improve efficiencies and make care more accessible to certain populations in the near term. However, she said it’s unlikely that doctors will use it for clinical purposes like patient care anytime soon.
“Technology-making decisions give those of us who are risk-averse the heebie-jeebies,” she said. “AI can do a certain amount of things, but when you want to be very personalized in medicine, think about journeys, for example […] not every breast cancer is the same, not every pancreatic cancer is the same. There are human factors that go into that.”
Prateesh Maheshwari, the managing director for health tech investor Maverick Ventures, agreed that hospitals will “continue to lag on technology adoption” in 2024. However, more insurers and other payers could use generative AI in 2024 to help field patient questions on plan selection and benefits, Maheshwari said.
“When you start touching clinical workflows and things like clinical decision support—or even these concepts for algorithms or making diagnostic decisions—those things will ultimately have to get to the FDA. They will take a longer time to get to market,” he said.
Dave Latshaw II, CEO and chief science officer of AI drug development company BioPhy, said he expects AI technology to help speed up clinical trials in 2024 and determine which drugs with FDA approval could be used by new patient populations. Further, AI technology could be “integral” in helping drugmakers alleviate supply chain issues that have affected in-demand drugs in the last year, he said.
Drug costs will remain a top concern for employers and payers.
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Dave Berkemeier, president and owner of On-Site Health Solutions, said the “big emphasis” on drug costs and price transparency in 2023 is expected to continue into the new year.
“From our perspective, employers are hurting whenever there are renewals. All of them are getting increases this year for medical—a large part of that is because of the Rx costs associated with brand name drugs that have no generic formulary equivalent,” he said. “For 2024 we’re really focused on the Rx savings opportunities and helping employers who are struggling,” he said.
The growing demand for costly GLP-1 drugs, which were developed to treat Type 2 diabetes before becoming popular weight loss solutions, will also likely stay top of mind for many employers, Maheshwari said.
“If you look at the pipeline of GLP-1s, there’s a lot of new drugs that we think are going to come on the market over the next few years. The bottleneck is going to start becoming access and what do payers and employers pay for these and under what circumstances?” he said. “One of the things that you’re gonna start seeing in 2024 is solutions around how to retain people who are on GLP-1s, and for those who are turning off of them, how do you help them go to a non-GLP-1 world where they can deal with their muscle loss, they can deal with a lot of their weight loss and continue some of those habits?”
Startups that benefitted from post-Covid investments could merge as early funding from investors runs out.
Although it’s hard to predict what the healthcare financing market will look like in 2024, Maheshwari offered that it will likely look similar to the end of 2023 with “no material improvement or degradation.” However, he contended that the industry could see new mergers as startup companies funded in 2020 and 2021 “are coming up against their cash runway[s].”
“Some of these companies are going to join forces instead of going out to the external financing market,” Maheshwari predicted. “A lot of subscale players will have difficulty in this financing market. That’s just a prediction around what are the exit paths available to some of these smaller Series A-, Series B-, Series C-stage startups.”