GNS Healthcare Blog

We asked industry thought leaders from across the healthcare ecosystem to weigh in on their predictions, hopes and ruminations for the year ahead.

From cancer therapy to data sharing to patient apps to affordability, we share some of 2019's most thoughtful predictions.

Here's what healthcare's thought leaders are saying.

  More and more medical centers are going to be sharing data (especially electronic health record data) with each other, and with the right tools and talent coming together, I’m predicting more interest in using this important data to learn what’s working in medicine, what’s missing, and what might be excessive.  

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the UCSF, Scientific Advisor at Geisinger Health System, Founder and Scientific Advisor at NuMedii, Inc.
and Personalis, Inc

  2019 will see the emergence and adoption of patient-facing apps that use health-data acquired by patients through their iPhone (through the SMART/FHIR API) in ways that were not anticipated by thought leaders in healthcare. We will also see the growing recognition of the benefits of immunotherapy in cancer and increasing concern about the affordability of cancer therapy with these agents.  

Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School

  My vision for 2019 is that many of the 2018 industry vertical integrations (Aetna-CVS, Cigna-ESI, others) will in 2019 message to the marketplace their ambitious data intensive strategies for future success. The challenge for execution will be timing and corporate cultures, and my hope is that ultimately these information management strategies will lead
to higher quality, more outcomes driven, and patient-centric and efficiency based healthcare delivery.  

Ira Klein, Senior Director of Quality, Strategic Customer Group at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson

  I believe the top two challenges for healthcare in 2019  are affordability of healthcare as well as its associated consumer experience. These two are difficult problems to solve, but using more data than we have ever had before, and applying more sophisticated analytic tools, are a great start to making real progress here.  

Patrick Getzen, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Blue Cross and
Blue Shield of North Carolina

  My hope for 2019 is that industry, biotech, and academia will advance common ways to organize, curate, and share their data.  

Joseph Lehar, Vice President Data Science, Oncology at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson

  In 2019, I hope to see further advances in the accessibility and portability of individualized healthcare data, empowering patients to leverage data generated on them for the benefit of both their health and that of broader communities. By democratizing access to these data, returning some agency to the patient in the context of their own care, we can help shift focus from the current reactive model of medicine to a more proactive, preventative medicine model, where the physician serves as a co-pilot with patient along their healthcare journey.  

Eric Schadt, PhD, CEO and Founder, Sema4; Dean for Precision Medicine and Professor, Predictive Health and Computational Biology, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai