"Necessity is the Mother of Innovation": Here's the Four That Need It

Actually, the Population Health Blog wishes it had coined that adage.

While a quick internet search indicates that the quote is on a host of business websites, the PHB only just discovered it on this post on disruptive health care innovation.

While there's a lot of management jargon, the author makes a good point about health reform's four necessities.  Any health technology provider, clinical enterprise, population health vendor, pharma company, health insurer, research outfit or government entity that can solve just one will have our collective gratitude. 

1) Millions of new Medicaid enrollees who are struggling with the twin burdens of poor health status and socioeconomic challenges.  If there is a clinical-technology platform that can provide care for this population, now is the time for it to step forward.

2) An influx of healthy millennials who, instead of having "needs" (that was their grandparents' problem) or "desires" (that was their parents' problem), have expectations that they believe can be significantly met with their handhelds.

3) Tens of millions of chronically ill persons who need to have a higher value medical home model scaled up, while we find even better industrial-based approaches to get them to self-manage.  At home.

4) High deductibles: if we can get money out of a checking account in Idaho while visiting Istanbul, there's got to be a way to minimize the disparate impact of high out of pocket expenses with increased transparency, value-based purchasing, tax sheltered accounts and other cloud-based financial tools.