Today, 20 years after publishing his inaugural report on the consumer-led revolution in the healthcare sector, Ryan Daniels, CFA, writes that his thesis remains largely intact and continues to unfold rapidly. Daniels believes a consumer-centric ecosystem is now an integral part of the U.S. healthcare market, and the recent actions by myriad industry leaders—both inside and outside the traditional healthcare landscape—appear to support his view. In this ecosystem, he believes that consumers, in tandem with disruptive healthcare technology and services providers, remain the key to solving healthcare’s woes, particularly the unsustainably high costs and mixed quality of healthcare in the U.S.
With a market driven by a confluence of industry developments that caused a massive amount of pressure on profit margins for many organizations’ legacy operations, our Consumer-Centric Healthcare: 2025 Update report comes at an interesting time for the sector. Retail innovators have exited the space en masse, a remarkable turnaround after a significant wave of investments only a year earlier. That being said, we believe these decisions were spurred less by fundamental changes and more by overarching pressures to rapidly improve profits at the parent entity.
In this report, Daniels presents an updated overview of the emerging consumer-centric healthcare marketplace focused on five key elements over the coming years:
- A continued need for healthcare cost control, which remains pressing given a recent uptick in healthcare expenditure rates
- Increased quality and pricing transparency for healthcare products and services
- Growing responsibility for healthcare utilization and quality at both the consumer and provider levels
- Increasing employer, insurer, and consumer support for more consumer-centric healthcare solutions
- Greater use of healthcare information technology solutions among providers and consumers
For more information about William Blair’s healthcare research please contact us or your William Blair representative.