By: John Lavey | Hammock President/COO
As this is the first Healthcare Idea Email of the year, it naturally lends itself to predictions and forecasts. I’ll start with some news that grabbed my attention.
This week Haven Healthcare announced that it would disband three years after the company was founded. Haven, the joint venture of JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon, was rolled out with the intention to “transform” healthcare.
In reality, Haven was a network designed to explore a wide range of healthcare solutions for the 1.5 million employees across those three aforementioned companies. There was a focus on new ways to make primary care easier to access, the simplification of insurance benefits, and reducing the cost of prescriptions. Haven assembled an all-star cast of industry leaders, including CEO Atul Gawande.
What Haven learned will be leveraged by those three companies to improve their own healthcare for employees. But Haven did not bring about the kind of disruption in healthcare that some people expected. That doesn’t mean Haven was a failure (and even if it was, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos believes in failing faster to bring about transformation). But it does demonstrate that healthcare is hard. Innovation must continue, but the challenges (access to care, cost of care, clinician workloads, consumer experience) are complex, and there aren’t any magic bullets.
Predicting what is going to “disrupt or transform” the healthcare industry is also tricky. Predicting means looking both ways before crossing the street and then being hit by an airplane. If anything, 2020 showed us that.
We look for continued innovations and solutions to the complex challenges we face in healthcare. Here’s my 2021 prediction: Change will come gradually and incrementally, then maybe all at once. But be ready and on the lookout for cars and airplanes.
Image: Getty Images
About Hammock Healthcare Idea Email | This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here . To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.