At the recent Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas Festival, over 1,000 healthcare leaders gathered to explore healthcare’s biggest challenges and debate possible solutions. With challenges such as access to care, sustainability, and care delivery in mind, a panel discussion from the American Hospital Association (AHA) titled “Deliver Care Anywhere: Rewriting the Site of Care Playbook” explored how health systems are pairing expertise in care delivery with consumer-oriented practices.
Among the top concerns and takeaways from the discussion were:
· An enhanced focused on going green in the healthcare section
· A need for providers to be more “consumer-responsive”
· An increased investment in women’s health concerns
According to industry statistics, approximately 8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions originate in the health sector. As such, health leaders at the festival described, “practical, cost-effective actions with dramatic payoffs, including designing green surgical suites that limit the use of anesthetics with high carbon footprints, reducing building emissions, reconfiguring transportation and supply chains, and curbing single-use plastics.”
During an AHA-convened panel on how consumer-driven care is redefining healthcare, Tina Freeze Decker, past chair of Michigan Health & Hospital Association and president and CEO of Corewell Health, said, “The rapid rise of retail health has introduced a convenient, affordable and personalized consumer-oriented journey that hospitals are struggling to match.”
She added, “Disruptors have a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo,” noting that retailers outperform traditional providers in collecting and understanding data, building patient loyalty, and making billing transparent.
In the area of women’s health, statistics show women have been underrepresented in medical research, which shows only about 4 percent of overall funding for research and development and only 1 percent of total venture capital healthcare funding goes to products and services specifically addressing women’s healthcare. As a result, investors are looking to technology and products that meet women’s health needs for new market opportunities.
Addressing the issue of women’s health, Maria Velissaris, managing partner of SteelSky Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on women’s healthcare and health equity, took the festival opportunity to highlight two new women-focused ventures: Origin, a pelvic floor physical therapy platform; and Raydiant Oximetry’s fetal heart monitor — which is currently in FDA trials and designed to reduce the 300,000 unnecessary emergency C-sections performed annually because of less-reliable technology.
