What healthcare stories got people talking in 2017

2017 was the year of technology. Whether it was innovation in blood-testing technology, patients asking Amazon’s Alexa if they have the flu or the FDA approval of the first CAR-T therapy, there were a number of medical and technological advances this year that seek to disrupt the healthcare industry's status quo.

While big industry issues like drug pricing and the plausibility of an Affordable Care Act repeal simmered at the surface, it was demand for technology as a means to lower costs, improve care and streamline workflow that took center stage.

Here are the trends that caused the most buzz both on and off LinkedIn this year.

Healthcare turns to retail (finally!).

After months of speculation about whether Amazon would enter the pharmacy market, CVS Health’s decision in December to acquire Aetna for $68 billion came with a plan to put more medical care in the pharmacy chain’s retail stores.

Is the CVS-Aetna deal a play to stem competition from Amazon? Right now, that’s hard to tell. But what the proposed deal does do is highlight the need to make the often dysfunctional healthcare system more efficient and more consumer friendly.

“The healthcare industry is ripe for disruption, innovation, a better end-user experience, transparency, technological advances,” wrote Tonia Degner, a retail expert, in an article on LinkedIn. “The CVS-Aetna deal is just the beginning.”

And perhaps the merger is serving as a warning to traditional healthcare companies. Pharmacist Richard Waithe questioned whether competition is even an option when it comes to pitting a cautious healthcare operator against Amazon’s e-commerce dominance. “With recent news of CVS buying Aetna, it gives the illusion CVS will be real competition for Amazon,” he wrote. “CVS may survive. But they won’t win. See what Amazon did to Borders, Sears and every mall in America? I think they’re just warming up.”

“Healthcare is starting to borrow business best practices from hospitality, retail and high-tech to drive performance,” Michael Ruiz, chief digital officer at hospital network MedStar Health, wrote. “Examples include the emergence of digital technologies both on the patient acquisition side with online ‘appointment-ing’ and the use of telehealth both to reduce cost and improve the experience. Patient relationship management was the major innovation of this year.”

A new league of medicines came to market.

The first CAR-T therapy. The first sensor-based antipsychotic to track medication intake and share that data with physicians and caregivers. The first medicine to treat inherited blindness.

All of these treatments received FDA approval this year, marking what is close to a record-breaking year in terms of the number of approvals but, more importantly, a dynamic period for new therapies coming to market.

In the case of Kymirah, Novartis’ CAR-T therapy, the company also announced that it is using an outcomes-based model that only requires payment if the patients taking the drug respond to the therapy, which costs $475,000 per course of treatment.

“This approval marks a historic moment in the fight against cancer,” wrote Joe Jimenez, CEO of Novartis. “This therapy treats very sick children who are often out of options and are about to die. They’re children who shouldn’t be fighting cancer but should be out enjoying a normal childhood.”

More people started talking about clinician burnout.

Stanford Medicine researchers this year said that replacing a doctor who quits because of burnout costs the organization about $250,000.

This question of how to handle the burnout reported by physicians and nurses, especially in the years that take up medical school and residencies, has finally turned into the kind of topic that people are actively trying to answer.

“In America, it is far more dangerous to be a patient in a hospital than to fly 40,000 feet in the air in an aluminum tube at 500 miles per hour as an airline customer,” wrote Suvas Vajracharya, founder and CEO of Lightning Bolt Solutions, an automated scheduling system for clinicians. “Taking physician fatigue seriously would not fix every fatal medical error, but it would surely lead to greater patient safety.”

Because of the role that electronic health records play in filling up the physician’s day, that’s likely why we’re seeing companies and clinicians consider consumer tech tools like voice assistants as a way to reduce workload.

Google announced plans in October to study how its voice-assistant programs could reduce the work done by medical scribes, the clinicians often responsible for entering a doctor’s notes into the electronic health record, or even one day replace them.

Investment in digital health exploded.

By the third quarter of this year, digital-health funding hit roughly $9 billion and is predicted to top $11 billion in 2017, according to StartUp Health. That’s a big jump when compared to the $8.2 billion placed in digital health companies in all of 2016.

“In 2018, one thing will remain constant: The digital health field will continue to grow,” wrote Dr. Harold Paz, Aetna's chief medical officer.

Here are a few examples of the companies with some of 2017's biggest funding rounds:

• Grail, which made the LinkedIn Top Companies | Startup list, received $900 million in funding in March. It is developing cancer detection technology.
• Outcome Health, a digital ad platform targeting drugmakers, brought in $487 million in venture capital. (The company is now facing scrutiny and a lawsuit about whether it mislead advertisers and investors.)
• Guardant Health, also a developer of cancer detection technology, closed on a $360 million round in May.

Now it’s your turn. In your opinion, what were the biggest healthcare stories of the year? Let me know in the comments below or write an article or post of your own on LinkedIn using #HealthcareTrends2017.