Earlier in June I got an opportunity to attend AHIP Institute 2014 showcase and the Digital Health Experience launch event.

AHIP stands for America’s Health Insurance Plans. It’s the trade association representing about 1300 member companies and the health insurance industry. From the show floor you can clearly see that two things were on top of the mind for this group :

  1. **Accountable Care Organization (ACOs): **Every organization had a way or a solutions for health plans to participated in the shared risk aspect of accountable care organizations. Some took an approach of accountable care plans with a plethora of care co-ordination tools. I think the market offering is still evolving here.

  2. **Health Exchanges: **On the other hand, nothing can be as concrete as a shopping cart product for purchasing health insurance! Number of companies had private, public and employer enabled health insurance exchanges. However the work for public organization like ONC, and others with agencies like IDEO really caught by eye – http://www.ux2014.org/. UX 2014 is an effort to drive a standard enrollments and a user experience for health insurance exchanges! The work is very impressive and complete, which they had a reference implementation as well!

Digital Health Experience (DHX) was a side event for AHIP and had an impressive line up of talks from folks from academia and industry. The event distributed a copy of the book ePatient 2015, which is good resource of all things happening around patient engagement in digital health. Among other trends the book highlights care hacking as a mechanism in which consumers are trying to take control of their health. Among the talks at Digital Health Experience, following are my top 3 takeaways -

  1. Academia is innovating in health care and actually closing an end to end loop for new models of behavior change.

  2. Reward platforms are hitting critical mass with retails health offerings. Channels do matter

  3. Health plans are thinking about behavior chance driven by real time data from – shopping habits to clickstream!