These are the Digital Health predictions we got wrong in 2018

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At the end of 2017, Business Insider Intelligence laid out five digital health predictions for 2018 - but we didn't hit the nail on the head with all of them.

Here's a look at our 2018 expectations that missed the mark. Our past predictions are in bold below.

• AI, machine learning, and chatbot technologies will become must-haves for healthcare providers. While applications of artificial intelligence (AI) became more prevalent in 2018, we feel there haven't been enough clinical deployments of the tech to say it's a must-have for providers. Large-scale studies and feasibility trials of AI in healthcare were common in 2018, but clinical deployments that have an impact on patient care - like Geisinger's integration of an AI system into its radiology workflow, which helped reduce time to diagnosis by 96% - are an exception, not the norm. And healthcare chatbots are in the early adoption and feasibility testing phase too. Health systems that tend to be on the early side of the adoption curve, like Northwell and the Mayo Clinic, are still trialing the tech in different departments, per Modern Healthcare.
• Healthcare providers will begin to see major backlash from patients as care is impacted more than ever by cyber-attacks. This one's a mixed bag - it's true that health systems were riddled with data breaches in 2018, and providers have listedcybersecurity as their top concern in 2019. But it's less clear that their plans to increase cybersecurity budgets in the year ahead were spurred by concerns around patient backlash. It's more probable that their primary motivator is the financial repercussions of a data breach, considering the average cost of a healthcare data breach globally rose to $408 per lost or stolen patient record in 2018, up 7% from last year's average. For example, the US Department of Health and Human Services levied a $16 million penalty on insurance company Anthem this year for a 2015 breach that exposed the electronic protected health information of almost 79 million people.

   

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