Here's what SCIO Health Analytics experts believe will happen next year:

1. More and better use of data

"Improvements in natural language processing will give healthcare organizations access to a level of data and insights that were previously hidden," Higgins says. "Machine learning will make it easier to spot the trends and patterns that all of that combined data reveals. The result is organizations will be able to be far more prescriptive in their approach, testing hypotheses and making decisions that can drive real behavioral change, which has always been one of the greatest challenges they've faced."

2. Increased payer/provider/life sciences collaboration

Life sciences organizations will increasingly use analytics to demonstrate the efficacy of their treatments, collaborating with payers to increase transparency to prescribers and members. Analytics will also be used more widely by payers to reward providers based on their history of delivering quality outcomes. These collaborative efforts should help raise the overall standard of care while reducing costs and increasing patient/member satisfaction. 

3. Renewed focus on addressing opioid abuse

Analytics that can help uncover patterns of fraud, waste, and abuse of opioids among providers and patients will be in high demand.

"By monitoring the quality and cost of different treatments, and using analytics to match patients/members to new therapies that may help them deal with their specific circumstances better, we can begin to turn the tide," Higgins says. "If we extend this to gain insights on how comorbidities such as mental health disorders affect engagement, behaviors, and costs, we can develop treatment strategies that further drive down risks while improving outcomes." 

4. Addressing the high cost of pharmaceuticals

To make pharma more accountable, SCIO believes that health plans will pilot outcomes-based contracting with life sciences organizations, likely in phases, from claims data to metrics on the health status of the patient.

5. Value-based care here to stay

The transition to value-based care will continue. The ongoing shifting of risk from payers to providers and life sciences organizations is already accelerating, made even more urgent by the growth of the Medicare Advantage population – "where keeping patients/members healthier in the aggregate is critical to controlling costs."

Commercial payers "recognize the importance of delivering high-quality care while reducing costs, and the need for transparency," Higgins says. "They also recognize it's the right thing to do."