Preparing the 21st century healthcare industry

Bob Curry, Ph.D.

As KGI prepares the strategic plan that will take it to its 25th anniversary, the members of the KGI community are being challenged to imagine where we need to be 2022 to continue to prepare cutting-edge graduates who will work across the healthcare value chain.

During a post-dinner exercise Wednesday night, we were encouraged to consider a map of imminent changes in healthcare suggested by Bob Curry, who is chairman of our Board of Trustees, a veteran VC, and now CEO of Perceptimed.

Based on this experience, Bob suggested four megatrends that KGI should consider:

1. Growth in the science of diagnostic, prognostic, and monitoring tools will be explosive and be increasing paired with drug and procedure usage.
2. Drugs will become every more customized to treat highly defined cohorts as characterized in the discussion point above. This will change both the nature of drug discovery and of clinical trail design.
3. Healthcare will be delivered by a broader, integrated team of professionals than has been the traditional norm. Pharmacists and clinical diagnosticians will be teamed with physicians and nurses in staffing the healthcare system.
4. Hospital systems and health insurance companies, as we currently recognize them, will disappear and will be replaced by 50-100 integrated care organizations to cover the entire U.S. (e.g. 50-100 Kaiser-like organizations).

The first two points appealed to our scientists in the room, who (since our 1997 founding) have been thinking about genomic and personalized medicine. The third point relates to those interested in clinical care delivery, particularly our pharmacy school which trains its PharmD students to work in teams with MDs and RNs. The final point ties to the business side — our group within KGI — and the changes brought by ACA (Obamacare), both pushed by the strong patient incentives for adverse selection and pulled by incentives for Affordable Care Organizations.

Based on this, the 70+ trustees, faculty, staff and students at nine tables generated a series of ideas. From their ideas — and my own observations — I see four important trends:

• The importance of big data and data analytics. This is not just for analyzing genomic data for personalized medicine, but for patterns of clinical and other bioinformatic data for efficacy, drug-drug interactions, and other healthcare outcomes.
• New types of healthcare providers and business models for funding them. 
• Increasing importance of healthcare economics. Whether it’s HMOs, ACOs, capitation models, bundled pricing, or other approaches, we are moving away from a fee-for-service and dollars-per-pill model toward outcomes-based compensation.
• New regulatory approaches to deal with these changes.

Some of these trends were building and accelerating over the past two decades. (I've been with one HMO for 30 years). Others were accelerated by the ACA. Still others (the destruction of insurance companies) were not among the announced goals of the ACA, but may be its inevitable outcome.