2019: The Year Data Analytics and AI Made a Huge, Wavelike Breakthrough in U.S. Healthcare

As I wrote on Monday, 2019 was a year in which federal payment and regulatory policy dominated the discourse in the U.S. healthcare system as never before. As I mentioned, the conflict between the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and its Administrator Seema Verma, on the one hand, and a number of national healthcare associations, encapsulated the complex landscape around alternative payment models specifically, and more broadly, the attempted shift from volume-based to value-based reimbursement, as it stands right now. There’s no question that federal reimbursement change, driven by the looming cost cliff (the Medicare actuaries are predicting that total annual U.S. healthcare system expenditures will explode from their current total of $3.6 trillion to $5.963 trillion, by 2027—a 60-percent increase over eight years. No policymakers or policy leaders from either major political party believe that that trajectory is sustainable.