The top five tech trends in healthcare

Kaveh Safavi, senior managing director for the health industry at consulting firm Accenture, gave his top five biggest technological trends in the field at America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Institute & Expo 2017.

AI is the new UI

"AI means artificial intelligence and UI stands for user interface. That’s the concept of the actual experience - or the way that people interact with technology itself - is going to become smarter.

Ecosystem power place

"This is the next trend we’re paying attention to. That means it’s really becoming clear that the amount of technology being used in healthcare today can never come from a single entity or company. Thus, it’s likely that people are going to work with technology platforms that are created with parts from multiple different companies and the companies themselves are going to have to figure out how to cooperate.

The workforce marketplace

"This broadly refers to the fact that the distributed workforce - and the ability to go out and find people you need to do work - is no longer going to be limited to the traditional marketplace of your own employees. This is an extension of what’s been talked about for a long time, but this is describing the technology as making it inevitable that the workforce you seek will come from different places than you normally would find them.

Design for humans

"That’s essentially the recognition that technology has to be designed to fit the way that humans live their lives - as opposed to making people fit the technology. There are obviously healthcare examples, but in other cases there are lots of examples of where the technology has found its way much more easily into the way that you do work - as opposed to you having to go figure it out.

The uncharted 

"By that, we mean that the technology is creating business and regulatory challenges—and maybe ethical and social challenges - that we have no concept of; other than that we know that we’re opening up “Pandora’s box.” We’re going to see more and more that organizations are going to have to get together and think about how they want to address some of these unintended consequences - or even the necessary frameworks they’re going to need - in order to be able to take full advantage of the technology."