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2020: Oh, What a Year!

To say the least, 2020 has been a year of unexpected challenges. But as the saying goes, with every challenge comes opportunity.




As we wrap up the year, the team at Equilibrium Point has spent time thinking about platform improvements and extensions that will have the most impact in transforming healthcare data into positive action. In particular, we’ve been looking at how to best support customer initiatives focused on whole-person wellbeing, improved patient outcomes, cost-effective operations, and enhanced overall consumer experiences.


The headliners at this year’s Amazon Web Services online conference “re:Invent” highlighted solid improvements to cost, manageability, and security of cloud services in healthcare. In particular, Machine Learning (ML) services are becoming a new standard, with a wider variety of lower cost tools that are accelerating adoption.


Now is the time to implement company stretch goals with accompanying plans to test and implement in the next 3-6 months. We identified three key areas of consensus across our customers that are their key priorities for 2021:

  1. Culture of Invention: How to create a culture of invention throughout your organization? If anything, 2020 showed us all the importance of the ability to adapt and reinvent. Reinvent is not a switch you can simply turn ON. It is a culture you build over time across all levels of your organization, by enabling management and teams to innovate with emerging technologies, tools, and ideas. But how to get there, especially with so many partners, tools, and even platforms with thousands of service variations? Our best answer: Don’t overcomplicate things. Establish aggressive top-down goals and remove known barriers. Most importantly, enlist people within your organization that have the desire and urgency to innovate. Next, find outside talent that has a proven track record to innovate, reinvent, and have the required technical skills and agility. Finally, create an open environment that supports collaboration and ideation.

  2. Prioritize New Standard Technologies: As we all know, in healthcare there is a constant push for automation, improved data quality, and measurable health outcomes. Fortunately, there is a new standard to help achieve this: Machine Learning. Machine Learning can identify and flag key medical information, index events into longitudinal views, and supplement data with standardized labels (medications, conditions, diagnoses, procedures, etc.). There are many available ML models coming to market that maximize the value of health information. These models can help you answer important questions around how to predict disease onset earlier, identify patients requiring additional care, profile populations, and manage risk. Machine learning also enables powerful dashboards with natural language capabilities. Just type in your questions and answers are displayed automatically in graph views that highlight relevant insights. Our response: Prioritize technologies that have become the new standard, such as Machine Learning. Commit to a few machine learning projects in 2021 to compare with current models to show the cost/benefit of machine learning first hand.

  3. Reinvent Now: Innovation always seems to be a “high priority,” but then why does it end up as a lower priority on the roadmap when it comes to people, resources, and investment? Our best answer: Commit now and don’t wait to reinvent. The two things we can all count on is that the future will have more surprises, and the myriad pressures facing our healthcare system will not relent. But times of uncertainty often offer the best opportunity to advance your initiatives forward. In good times and bad, enterprises large and small need to keep evolving. Reinvent all the time!

What are your focus areas for reinvention in 2021? We would love to hear from you and include some of your insights into our roadmap.


Until then, thank you for your continued support and partnership.


Wishing you and yours a very happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!


The Equilibrium Point IoT Team

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