By LYGEIA RICCIARDI
Last week’s announcement by Aetna and Apple of their Attain “experience” designed to enable Aetna members to achieve better health using the Apple watch was the latest in a series of partnerships vying to shake up healthcare from an unconventional angle. Others include Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan’s collaboration to reshape health insurance, and Uber and Lyft’s numerous partnerships with Sutter, CareMore Health, and other healthcare systems to address transportation challenges for patients.
The Heat is On
Big changes in healthcare—including the shift to value-based care, the growing influence of consumerism, and a recognition that health outcomes depend on a wide array of everyday life factors ranging from foods to moods—are forcing the old guard in healthcare to recalibrate. Healthcare provider organizations alone engaged in a record-breaking 115 mergers and acquisitions in 2017, and continued apace until now, with deals already announced in 2019 between Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), among others.
The most interesting partnerships, from my perspective, pair traditional healthcare players with non-traditional ones: it’s a recognition that something fundamental has to change, a point which hasn’t been lost on the 84% of the Fortune 50 companies that are already in healthcare, up from 76% in 2013. Everyone from tech giants to car manufacturers seems to gambling to some extent on healthcare. And why not, when the potential jackpot just keeps growing?
