Predicting the Next 10 Years of Patient Engagement Tech: eBook is LIVE

While I started covering patient engagement as part of my broader foray into healthcare technology in late 2009, my interest in the topic picked up a few years later. On a whim, I decided to turn an article I’d written for CIO.com into a workshop proposal for HIMSS 2015 – and on an even greater whim, they accepted it. I then managed to parlay that speaking appearance (along with a few clips) into landing a role as an analyst at Chilmark Research looking at patient engagement technology.

Last summer, I was feeling slightly nostalgic when the calendar approached 10 years since I’d taken that job. I was quickly feeling puzzled, though – not because of life choices, mind you, but because the state of patient engagement technology was in such disarray. I’d been (perhaps a little too) wide-eyed in 2015 and was downright jaded by 2025.

Naturally, I turned those feelings into an eBook: Predicting the Next 10 Years of Patient Engagement. As the title suggests, my aim was less to rehash the past and more to try to figure out what the industry could learn from the technology’s disjointed journey.

Lessons learned, but far too late

The biggest thing I realized was that patient engagement technology isn’t a market segment. It’s a guiding principle for how healthcare providers should interact with patients, inside and (especially) outside the care delivery system.

The reason I don’t consider it a market segment – not any more, at least – is because patient engagement is too damn complicated for a single technology tool (or even suite of tools) to suddenly swoop in and make everything better. The proverbial road is littered with the wrecks of thousands of vendors who promised to do that and failed, some more miserably than others.

Once I figured this out, it wasn’t too hard to see where things went wrong for those trying to innovate in the space. Incumbent options got better, or at least less worse. New vendors fell short, while others operating in tangential spaces succeeded quickly. Pesky problems like application validation and interoperability didn’t go away. Above all, enthusiasm on the part of providers and patients failed to reach the same heights as inspiring conference keynotes.

Eventually, the industry learned valuable lessons about ROI, friction, change management, and the difficulties of standardization. By then, though, it was too late, and everyone was talking about AI.

Change can happen, but it will take work

The crux of my patient engagement eBook is what I expect the next 10 or so years of patient engagement technology to look like. (I say 10 or so years because it’s been more than a decade since I started exploring the space with scrutiny. It’s also a handy excuse for taking way, way too long to finish this thing.)

I’d love to be able to say I feel super optimistic, but I’ve never been a very good liar. Yes, things will continue to get better, and the future will likely see innovations that we cannot imagine in 2026. I just don’t think the pace will match the degree of innovation we’ll see in the rest of healthcare technology, let alone all the consumer industries healthcare is smitten with emulating. There are a few reasons I feel this way.

• Since 2015, nearly everyone who’s claimed to have solved the patient engagement problem has been wrong, and nearly everyone who’s been right has run out of money.
• Numerous external forces are making care delivery even more difficult than it needs to be; this strains the ability to engage with patients in any modality, analog or digital.
• The industry maintains its nagging tendency to gravitate toward seemingly easy solutions in lieu of attempting the lay the groundwork for meaningful progress.
• With income inequality on the rise, it’s easy to foresee a system where the wealthy have concierge physicians and the uninsured turn to chatbots – a trend the Pew Research Center noted is already playing itself out. Increased use of technology largely detached from the care delivery system (for now at least) isn’t going to make the engagement experience any better; in fact, it may only lead to further frustration for everyone.

In simple terms, making progress will come down to avoiding the mistakes that have been repeated almost ad nauseum since 2015. I think the industry can do it. The question is whether folks are willing to do the hard work to make change happen.

Predicting the Next 10 Years of Patient Engagement is free to download until May 31. Give it a read and let me know what you think.