What will 2016 bring to healthcare? Business watchers, presidential candidates give hints

2016 will be the year U.S. healthcare seriously reckons with consolidation, much of it brought on by Obamacare, as mergers and acquisitions continue among providers, payers and industry players—and as regulators assert their power to stem or encourage the tide.

So predicts PricewaterhouseCoopers, whose Health Research Institute is out with its annual list of 10 developments to keep an eye on over the next 12 months.

Also making this list:

• Care in the palm of your hand. “Thanks to technology and shifts in financial incentives,” the institute says, “care will begin to move into the palms of consumers’ hands, providing care anywhere, anytime.”
• Care moves to the community. As payment shifts to value-based models, health systems will “pursue lower-cost settings more aggressively than before while employing creative approaches to distributing care.”
• New databases and database tools improve patient care and consumer health. Big data will “allow industry players to analyze data from many sources in novel ways, finally unlocking insights embedded in the reams of information being collected about health consumers.”
• The medical cost mystery. “In the journey to value-based care,” forecasts PwC, “health systems dig in to calculate the true cost of services, an exercise that also can uncover opportunities to become more efficient and improve care.”

See if you agree with the thinking behind these and the other five items as you read the full report.

Another sharp observer offering worthwhile insights on things to come is Forbes.com contributing writer Unity Stoakes. He lays out 13 “transformative healthcare trends” registering on his radar. Examples:

• The line between consumers and healthcare orgs will continue to blur. “An increasing number of retail stores will start muscling into traditional services previously only offered at hospitals,” Stoakes writes. “Professional sports brands will offer healthcare services (think: The NFL launching brain science clinics or pro football teams partnering with hospitals to create specialized surgery centers).”
• Personalized products such as casts, prosthetics, wearables and a variety of patient-designed solutions will be made to order using software and printed at home. “A category of DIY inventions will become available as thousands of people start to make niche health and wellness products, creating new challenges for regulators who will need to keep pace with the scale and pace of customized health.”
• Low-tech solutions developed in resource-poor countries will begin to replace ‘outdated and clunky technology deeply entrenched’ in the healthcare systems of the developed world. “In 2016, we’ll start to see case studies coming out of Africa, India and South America,” predicts Stoakes, “that clearly demonstrate the potential of leapfrog innovation.”

Check out the rest of Stoakes’s bold projections.

But first, have you heard there’s a presidential election scheduled for 2016?

True, Barack Obama’s successor won’t settle in at the White House until 2017. However, the months leading up to the nominating conventions in July and, from there, to decision day on Nov. 8 will witness the frontrunners tweaking, refining and otherwise adjusting—potentially to historically consequential effect—the basic healthcare positions they’ve staked out along the trail.

• “I would certainly build on the successes of the Affordable Care Act and work to fix some of the glitches that you just referenced.”—Hillary Clinton (responding to a reporter’s question about deductibles having risen 67 percent over the last five years)
• “I remain fully committed to repealing every single word of Obamacare. We will recognize that this horrible experiment has failed.”—Ted Cruz
• “We need to pass a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. It will lower the cost of healthcare for a middle-class family by thousands of dollars a year.”—Bernie Sanders
• “[R]epealing and replacing Obamacare will be an urgent priority of my administration. Instead of relying on an outdated, big-government approach, I will utilize modern, consumer-centered reforms that lower costs, embrace innovation in healthcare and actually increase choices and improve quality of care.”—Marco Rubio
• “The Affordable Care Act created enormous progress by expanding healthcare to millions of Americans. The next president must build on the ACA’s success, while continuing to reduce costs, expand access and improve the quality of care”—Martin O’Malley
• “By expanding HEAs (health empowerment accounts) and high-deductible insurance coverage, my plan returns money and decision-making where it belongs—into the hands of American patients and their doctors.”—Ben Carson, MD  
• “Innovations, not mandates, will bring down health care costs. If we’re going to fix healthcare in this country, we need to wrest control away from Washington and give it back to the states, citizens and their care providers.”—Jeb Bush

Wait. Does this list leave out anyone important?

Oh yes. There’s one more.

“[Obamacare’s] gotta go. Repeal and replace with something terrific,” says the current lead contender for the Republican nomination. “The only way the government should be involved, they have to make sure those companies are financially strong. Other than that, it’s private. At the lower end, where people have no money, I want to try and help those people. I would work out some sort of a really smart deal with hospitals across the country.”

Whatever words healthcare stakeholders are using to describe 2016 in hindsight a year from now, boring isn’t going to be one of them.