Institute Report
2018 and Beyond: Outlook and Turning Points
Mar 13, 2018

About the report

This report describes ten predicted changes that will impact global health in 2018 and beyond and highlights impactful areas where stakeholders are using evidence and technology to solve the problems of human health. This report focuses on facts and data, and attempts to bring evidence to topics often hotly debated and discussed in the public realm. Key themes include trends in innovation, technology and healthcare spending. 

Report Summary

Global health is poised to meet a series of key turning points, and changes seen in 2018 will mark the key inflections that drive the outlook for the next five years and beyond. The types of medicines being developed, the way technology contributes to health, and how the value of healthcare is calculated are all markedly changing. 

Innovation is a key theme, including the way regulators of medicine and applicants filing for approval will increasingly support clinical submissions with real world data. A wave of cell and gene therapies are bending the definition of what constitutes a drug, both clinically, and in terms of expectations of outcomes, duration of treatment and costs. 

Technology itself can be a treatment, and mobile apps are newly appearing in treatment guidelines as a key feature of future care paradigms. Furthermore, mobile technology can be an enabler of telehealth communication that brings providers and patients together at substantially lower costs than traditional consultations. 

In recent years, concerns about escalating medicine costs have captured significant attention. In 2018, some of the key drivers of medicine spending growth appear to be slowing spending rather than driving it upward. The causes of slowing growth are directly linked to payers concerns about budgets and to newly emerging mechanisms to adjudicate value and thus limit the potential for out-of-control spending growth.

 

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