I find people love to claim they predicted everything. “I told you that Bitcoin and Tesla and TikTok would be huge” or “Yeah, I always said this pandemic would still be raging into 2021”. So here we are at the start of 2021 – tell me, what are your predictions for healthcare this year?
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Here are some of the top predictions I found:
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Influx of Healthcare M&As in 2021
Forbes magazine has predicted something that you probably expected. Due to the hard econom
ic year, many smaller healthcare companies will not be able to survive and Forbes predicts they will be taken over by either larger or more successful companies in 2021. I think we can definitely expect to see many mergers and acquisitions over the coming year, especially in healthcare.
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Increase in Mental Health and Substance Abuse patients
This one from OptumRx who predicts based on their analytics that there will be a sharp increase in behavioral health patients. While unfortunate, I don’t think any of us are surprised to hear about the increase in mental health issues and substance abuse disorder as a result of a year fraught with many challenges.
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Quicker Payments for Services Rendered
The first two predictions I listed weren’t too shocking, I think we were all nodding our heads along. But this prediction from Modern Healthcare is quite amazing! According to an article by Modern Healthcare, they predict that because of the advance in technology and access to banking and payer databases, we can expect payments in 2021 to be close to real time, rather than 30 days until the provider gets paid.
Wait, let me repeat that: Close to real-time payments from
when services are rendered due to advances in technology! If this comes true, the effects would be incredible for providers.
What do you think? Do you expect these to come true? Do you think there’s is something realistic that we can actually expect practically real-time payments? How would that change the industry?
What are your predictions for healthcare in 2021?
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