Top Healthcare Industry Predictions for 2024: Tech, Workforce, Costs

January 08, 2024 - The start of a new year brings a slew of healthcare industry predictions.

What trends will take hold in 2024? What strategies will be widely adopted? What will remain the same and what will radically change?

Our editorial senior staff have been asking experts these questions as the new year approached. Now, four staff members will share their findings. The responses cover a broad spectrum of topics including health equity, value-based care, healthcare technology, workforce management, and more.

Kelsey Waddill: 2024 is here, and that means everyone is breaking out their New Year predictions. On today's episode, some of Xtelligent Healthcare Media's senior staff including Kyle Murphy, our VP of editorial, Sara Heath, executive editor, Anuja Vaidya, senior editor of mHealthIntelligence and special events lead and me Kelsey Waddill, managing editor and multimedia manager gathered round to unwrap the healthcare trends and strategies we expect to see in 2024.

A little editorial note before we get started. This episode was recorded in 2023 before the holidays, so sometimes when we refer to "this year," we're actually technically talking about last year. Contextually it should be pretty obvious. You'll catch on. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.

All right, let's dive in. We're going to start with the area that everybody has a little something to say on, and that sparks a lot of interest, which is technology. Anuja, I know that you've been tracking the digital health trends of 2023 very closely, so I'm really curious, and we'll start with you just on what you've been hearing. What [are] the vibes for 2024? What's it going to look like?

Anuja Vaidya: Hello, hello. Yeah, it's been a very interesting year. I think it's been a little bit of reality coming up to the digital health space after a couple of years of really sky-high funding, sky-high valuation, just riding on this high. And I feel like this year was a little bit of a reality bite situation because obviously 2020 we saw some really major boom in the digital healthcare demand. Virtual capital was skyrocketing. I think it reached a decade high of nearly $30 billion in 2021, according to Rock Health. But then funding fell by almost half in 2022 and then fell again by almost another half in the first half of 2023. So we're going into a much more, I think, sober market. I think what we're going to see next year, at least based on the conversations I've been having, is fewer investors, but investors who are much more knowledgeable about digital health, which kind of means that companies coming into the space really have to show what they're all about. They really have to show their value. They really have to demonstrate their outcomes. There's less space to just maybe "dream wildly," which I feel like was happening a little bit in 2020 and 2021. And they really have to be like, "this is what our solution, our tool can actually do" versus "what we hope it'll do."

We've also seen this year, we've had some companies get into a little bit of trouble. Pear Therapeutics comes to mind. We saw them kind of file for bankruptcy and another company, Babylon Health, also filed for bankruptcy, which is pretty quick because they were riding pretty high just a couple of years ago. One of the market experts I spoke to made the point that they maybe scaled a little bit too quickly, and I think we saw that happening across the board where they maybe had a product that worked really well for one indication and they immediately decided to open it up to a number of other indications. Healthcare is a very complicated beast, as we all know. If something works in one space, that does not mean it's going to work in any other spaces. Definitely a little bit more of a sober mood.

And the other thing too, I'll mention really quickly before handing it back, we also saw a lot of retailers, pharmacy chains, technology companies make big moves into digital health this year. I mean, we know Amazon's been trying for a while and [has] not seen wild success, but they did expand their Amazon Clinic. And I'm curious to see how that goes because that seems to be a little bit more in Amazon's wheelhouse, because it essentially seems like Amazon for telehealth companies where they're just the facilitator, they're just the connector, which they've obviously shown that they can do in the e-commerce space. So that could work. And, of course, now they have One Medical, which they're definitely going to lean on in terms of healthcare delivery.

So we'll see how that goes. But I do think that retailers, pharmacy chains, your Costco, your Walgreens, they do have some advantages over provider organizations, which I think is interesting. Namely, that they are able to provide that omnichannel experience where they can conduct the visit, fill the prescription, and kind of do a number of different things just within their brand, within their network. But still, they can really only provide sort of low acuity care. So that competition is heating up, but it is really, I think, only heating up in that low acuity space. So yeah, those are just some of the trends I've been following this year that I think we'll continue to see evolve into 2024.

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah, I think that last point is really interesting about the bigger kind of retail companies too that are trying to pull together different approaches. Kyle and I talked a bit about this on Healthcare Strategies | Headlines because I think that's something that I've been hearing in the employer space as well, is that employers are very overwhelmed by the options, which is completely understandable. When we were at HLTH 2023, there [were] more than 900 vendors, and a lot of those were technology vendors who are offering a bunch of different point solutions to employers and payers. But especially for those employers, they're getting overwhelmed by the number of options out there.

And so for these companies like Costco and Walgreens and CVS Health, Amazon even, who are pulling together a lot of different technologies into one space, that's a huge opportunity I imagine in the digital health space right now because there's definitely, I can say, a demand for that amongst the employers who are just looking at a lot of different options that are hard to thread together into one thing.

And on that note, Sara, I know that you write a lot on more the consumer side. How are patients looking at all of these options and engaging with all of these options? What are some of the trends of what is being offered to them in 2024?

Sara Heath: Yeah, I think if we want to keep talking about having a bunch of different point solutions, huge priority for organizations is making sure that anything that's consumer-facing is unified under the same umbrella if they can do it within their provider app or their patient portal. So the interoperability and the ability to integrate these different solutions into the EHR, which dovetails into the patient portal, is super-duper important. Anecdotally, I think that's more or less happening. Patients really don't want to have to log into a different billing system versus their medical record versus appointment booking, for example. And by and large, they're not necessarily having to, because we're able to plug these in, generally speaking. It's obviously not perfect. But...

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah.

Sara Heath: What a lot of organizations now want for their consumer-facing tech is to decrease their footprint. So just like the patient doesn't want to have to log into all of these different services, the organization doesn't want to have to manage all of these services. They don't want to have a different vendor for billing, a different vendor for their patient portal, a different vendor for booking, wayfinding, all these different patient-facing apps. So I know KLAS found earlier this year that a lot of organizations want to decrease that footprint for themselves as well. And then I also think looking forward into 2024, I think I chatted Kyle about this a few weeks ago, and we laughed at how buzzwordy it's going to be. Everyone's going to be saying "techquity" this year.

Kelsey Waddill: Wow, that's a new one for me.

Sara Heath: So--I'm not 100% sure. Conceptually, don't hate it. Don't love a buzzword though.

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah.

Sara Heath: But I think techquity is going to be super-duper huge. I'm already hearing from organizations this idea of not offering technology just based off of what they can see from a patient. So super easy example is, "oh, this patient is old, they're not going to want to use the patient portal"--not necessarily allowing those preconceived notions to influence how they're using technology with patients. And I think that's going to be a bigger one.

And then probably finally, and this is maybe not necessarily in line with everything that we've talked about today, but it is a word that everyone is super buzzy about right now is AI.

Kyle Murphy: What does that mean? "AI," I've never heard that term before.

Sara Heath: AI. What is an AI? What is an analytic? Artificial intelligence.

Kyle Murphy: I think I heard about that.

Sara Heath: I think there's obviously so much research happening about how well it actually works. Not my area of expertise, but healthcare is really exploring how that's going to influence the patient and the consumer, how acceptable it's going to be to the patient and the consumer. I think patients are generally... They know it's inevitable, so they're not getting super hyper about it, but they do have some worries about where the information upon which the AI is trained is coming from. They want to make sure that it's built off of good information. They want to know that their provider is using an AI tool from a very reputable vendor or source, and they also want to know that their provider is using AI. They don't want their provider using AI behind their backs, for lack of a better word. They want to know when it's being used, and they do have a few concerns about their data privacy. But generally speaking, I think transparency about where the AI is coming from when it's being used, that's going to be the most important thing in making sure that it is acceptable to consumers and provides for a good consumer experience.

Kelsey Waddill: Kyle, it sounds like you guys have been talking a lot about this. I know you have your finger on the pulse of the healthcare tech world.

Kyle Murphy: At all times.

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah. What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence?

Kyle Murphy: I think artificial intelligence, I think just like everything we're talking about, is just another form of technology that because people don't know a tremendous amount about it, it's very easy to hype. I think it's up there with some of those things where people were claiming to do population health, I don't know, eight or nine years ago when they didn't actually have the systems to do it.

So I think one of the problems is there's too much technology in healthcare. There's too many barriers in the way of two humans getting together and actually interacting because most people are... I think most patients are searching for empathy and care and consideration and time. And I think unless technology is actually reducing administrative work, that it's actually not achieving the goal that we had all agreed that it was supposed to, that it was supposed make things more accessible, more convenient, and it was supposed to allow us to have more time together.

I think there's way more technology than healthcare needs because at the end of the day.... A lot of quality care used to actually be able to be delivered even on a paper record just because people actually could handle those things and see those things, whereas now information is spread across the entire healthcare system into the retail space. And I don't necessarily think that's a good thing because I think it spreads spending much more widely and you don't have any kind of sense of quality. I think the only people who understand what healthcare spending is at this point are payers because they see the claims and they see where you end up. But when we talk about prevention and we talk about PCPs, if you're receiving all your healthcare episodically from an urgent care center, from a CVS, from those types of things, that PCP can't have any kind of impact on helping you prevent these types of things. So I actually think it runs counter to what the triple aim, quadruple, quintuple aim was achieving to do.

And I really don't think you can do equity by throwing more technology at it. What has to be done is that you actually have to go meet people where they are and enable those human interactions to occur and stop saying that technology is the solution when it's just a means to an end. Thank you. Soapbox done.

Sara Heath: I do think where a lot of organizations are seeing technology and AI having potential--and I'm hearing this on the provider side, not necessarily vendor or anything--is that the technology can help the low acuity patients, so simpler healthcare needs or simpler social needs. So for me, making an appointment with my primary care physician, I'm okay with hopping on and maybe scheduling that with a chatbot or whatever, online booking, but someone who's a little bit more socially or clinically complex who needs that phone call and needs the empathy that Kyle was just mentioning, or honestly, the person who just fricking doesn't want to use the technology, it's going to free up the workforce to be able to provide that empathy. I'm just playing devil's advocate a little bit on what Kyle said.

Kyle Murphy: It's supposed to be a means of entry, right? Technology is supposed to be an enabler, but it's just another barrier to entry if you don't have access to that technology. We still know for a fact that broadband is not widely adopted in the United States of America. There're actually parts of the world that are actually more developed because they went the wireless route. So I think it's actually troubling because people's experience of healthcare--we're in Massachusetts, most of us; Anuja, you're in Chicago--living in a metropolitan area, you're spoiled for choice. It seems like healthcare is so simple. Every corner has something that you could go to, but when you actually think about the American populace and how spread out they are, to me it's inconceivable to think that technology is going to be the solution to that problem.

I think a lot of the workforce management stuff comes down to: are we relying too much on physicians to do all the work? And then are we requiring them when they do the work to document it so heavily so that they can get reimbursed properly or can contest once a payer has rejected some kind of claim or contested it? The burden of the healthcare system nowadays is on the provider and the patient. The payer is not burdened.

Anuja Vaidya: Yeah, not at all. And to that point too, I think we see that in the virtual care space all the time where a couple of years ago everyone was like, "oh, this is it. We're all just going to be virtual all the time. Healthcare is going to change." And now a couple of years down, in-person care is almost back to, maybe not to pre-pandemic levels like--telehealth is still very much around, but it's certainly not the revolution I think people were touting it would be. We still see patients very much prefer in-person care, want to go in, want to see their physician face-to-face, talk to them. Even for me for low acuity stuff, sure, I wouldn't mind doing a quick telehealth visit, but I'd still like to see my PCP once a year, see her face to face, talk to her, have her really make sure everything is good. So yeah, it's true that even though we're spoiled for choice, that's great, but I don't think it can ever really fully take over the way people were saying that it might a few years ago.

Kyle Murphy: Sara, I wonder if--you and I are old enough in the health IT space to remember when there used to be more than three EHR vendors, right?

Sara Heath: Oh, there were so many.

Kyle Murphy: There were a dime a dozen. There were scores of them. And I see that when you look at telehealth, virtual care companies, there are scores. They can't all coexist because a lot of times when it's like ChatGPT and all the "wrappers" that people have, all these different companies that sell you an AI solution that's built on ChatGPT, so many of them are superfluous or do exactly the same thing. So why do you need all these different options? So I think you'll either see contraction and I think--coming back to your point, Anuja--you'll see companies shutter because there's no sustainability. The demand can't really keep up.

So unless it's targeted to an actual use case--and usually when you talk about use case, that means that there's a determinable ROI that.... I really don't think that there's enough room in healthcare, even though there's what $4.1 trillion spent on healthcare in the United States annually. Most of that money goes to administrative waste. So I don't even think that saying that technology is going to help reduce that problem is really the right way to think about it.

There's always technology. There's always been technology. What there isn isn't enough of are people and there isn't enough time and there probably isn't enough money in the pockets of the people who have to pay for it.

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah, we definitely saw in 2023 the impact of not having enough people with all of the major strikes--the historic Kaiser strike that happened, but that's not the only one that happened. We saw providers just voicing a lot of burnout from being strained with not enough resources and mainly not enough people. And also pay is a big driver of those conversations as well.

We're touching a little bit on workforce management here, workforce issues, and obviously tech is something that people are turning to help alleviate that. It's not a silver bullet by any means, but I think we have seen that more and more. And I'm wondering, Anuja, is that something you anticipate we're going to keep seeing in 2024?

Anuja Vaidya: This is something I've been thinking about a lot because yeah, it is something that I think again, gets said, tossed off in conversation like, "yeah, of course we have tech. It's going to help workforce management. It's going to help retention." So I explored this question a little bit earlier on: does it really though? Because on the flip side, we do see studies coming out...there was a recent one that showed that the increase in telehealth use during the pandemic was linked to an increase in the time physicians spent working in the EHR. And even last year we saw another study that said that work outside of work was higher when physicians use telehealth. So there is some research telling us that it increases the time and administrative burden that physicians are already drowning [in].

But of course, on the flip side, there is research and also anecdotal evidence showing that it does make it easier for physicians to connect with patients. Something like remote patient monitoring cuts down the need for a patient to come in and provide blood pressure readings or glucose monitor measures or whatever it is, the data that physicians need. It can help, especially in the mental health space. We have physicians who can just work from home themselves, so that gives them better work-life balance. So there are lots of ways in which it can theoretically help alleviate this burnout.

And I think the conclusion that a lot of the people I spoke to came to is: it's really all about how it's implemented. Yes, it can help, but you have to implement it in a way that makes sense for your organization-specific needs, your physician-specific needs. And really the best way to do that is to include clinicians in that implementation process early and often, and have them be a part of that implementation so that their workflow isn't becoming more challenging because of technology implementation. But it's actually becoming easier, which is the point of the implementation to begin with.

Sara Heath: If you break that down by specialty too--I have no data to back this up, but I'm guessing--

Kyle Murphy: But that won't stop you.

Sara Heath: ... a primary care doctor. Did you say that won't stop me? [laughter] The primary care doctor that's managing chronic illnesses with their patients probably has a ton of admin and "oh, my patient who I've seen and has this really longitudinal care plan, has a prior auth and all that stuff," whereas--and nobody's going into primary care. Residency slots for family physicians is super low. Where people are going in is A) where the pay is higher. So like plastics and sports medicine, surgery. What's the administrative burden for a doctor who might just be seeing, not once, but for one episode of care, this one knee replacement, this one, I don't know, nose job.

Kyle Murphy: Do you know what's funny about that, do you know how they say--you guys probably heard this before--like "the PCP is the quarterback of care"? You know that the quarterbacks are--

Sara Heath: They don't treat them like that. No.

Kyle Murphy: Do you know the quarterbacks are the highest paid players in the NFL? They make more money than anybody else. In healthcare, PCPs don't make that money.

Sara Heath: No. Yeah.

Kyle Murphy: It's like you're asking for it. It's like going into teaching where you love your vocation so much, so, in some ways, you make yourself exploitable.

Sara Heath: And you know who carries a lot of that primary care provider is also not necessarily an MD.

Kyle Murphy: Of course.

Sara Heath: But a nurse practitioner and a PA who--I have to imagine the pay's a little bit lower there too, and it's like even more thankless, more of a "vocation," as Kyle word it.

Kyle Murphy: Imagine if those people could bill, but they didn't have to work into an underserved area in order to qualify for it. It'd be amazing the type of care you get. And it's amazing that nursing has an empathy component to it. Just coming back to it, pat myself on the back.

Sara Heath: Yeah. Good job.

Kyle Murphy: Thank you.

Kelsey Waddill: I think it's good to add... We're talking a lot from the provider perspective and on the payer point, it was brought up a few moments back to strain it here in terms of workforce management is really, it's on the providers, but I think we can't let the payer off as if they're not able to do anything about it. I think that in this conversation it often seems like the solution has to be worked out internally. What I'm trying to get to is that there's a lot that payers actually can do--and some are doing--to try to alleviate some of that shortage. Whether or not it's working, whether enough of them are taking that kind of a step is a totally different issue.

But there have been a lot of payers even this year who have chopped off a significant amount of prior authorizations trying to reduce that burden. I think the provider voice has been very loud and very strong on how much of not just a burden, but also a detriment to patients prior authorizations can be. And it is partly related to patient outcomes, but it also reinforces this administrative burden that providers are struggling under. So that's just one honestly easy step that payers can take to minimize the burden for providers and that some are doing.

Some are also trying to adjust those reimbursement models and then doing things like trying to resource--there have been some payers who have tried to provide resources for providers in covering education, training, programs, mental health care and loan forgiveness, those kinds of things. Again, are these strategies being implemented widely enough to make a big difference? No. But I think it's important to state that these strategies exist and are being implemented.

Kyle Murphy: You remember there was a concept called value-based care that was really gaining momentum before the pandemic where people were collaborating together and they were focusing on a thing called quality. It was really unique and it was about prevention, and for some reason, I don't remember what, but something happened and that all went away. And then it seemed like volume-based care just came back with a flurry--or with a fury, depends.

Kelsey Waddill: At one point there was a fourth aim that was added, which was "provider experience." I've heard so little about that in recent years. Maybe COVID destroyed that experience in a long-term way.

Kyle Murphy: There's very little in terms of qualitative assessment in healthcare. But there's money going out the door nonstop, and each year it increases as a percentage of overall US GDP. But to me, I would like to know where my dollars are going if I were the one holding the purse.

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah. Speaking of costs, we did also want to touch on that because that's going to be a main driver of a lot of the decisions that are being made in healthcare this year.

In case nobody heard there's going to be an 8.5% increase in spending for employers, and a 7% increase in medical cost trend in 2024. So speaking from an employer perspective, that's going to be pretty defining for their decisions and their strategies. They're literally going by the way from a 5.4% increase in 2023 to an 8.5% increase that's why '24 so that's a big leap and drug costs are really driving that trend. Unfortunately for employers, that's not something that they can really have direct control over.

So the employer benefits consultants that I've talked to are saying that the top of mind issue is trying not to shift the costs over to employees as much in order to maintain attraction and retention. So they're going to have to get creative. And a couple of things that experts have been telling me that employers are looking at for the next year to deal with this is looking at women's health benefits and multi-generational benefits and looking at their workforce and being more targeted in the solutions that they choose for their employees to make sure that these solutions are actually having a return on investment actually being used. They're going to have to sit down with their solutions and cut out the fat of any technologies or any strategies that are just not being used or not helping cut costs.

They're also going to be looking at better navigation tools to help employees not get lost in the system, get more seamlessly transferred from one point of care to the next.

And then finally, they're going to just leverage some of those more typical strategies that we've seen, like centers of excellence, accountable care organizations contracting with them, and then those value-based care models that we were talking about, trying to return to that mentality and digging a little deeper on that. So that's one of the ways that in the insurance world and the employer world, those costs are going to be increasing. Obviously, insurers are also involved in trying to manage those costs.

Sara Heath: Yeah. I think the big issue is that healthcare is also expensive for the consumer, and when that happens, when they can't put on their credit card or don't have the cash for their financial responsibility, they're just not going to access it. Cost is the number one driver of poor medication adherence. It keeps people from accessing several other types of care. I am hoping that the price of actual services become something that we try to address more. I know Kyle was just talking about the cost of drugs, but just all sorts of healthcare services. Because it's starting to not just be a low-income problem in the United States. Commonwealth Fund has many reports showing that healthcare is as unaffordable for the richest Americans as it is for the poorest Europeans, which is crazy. It's a rich, affluent, wealthy problem in America--which, I hate to be super dark, but maybe that's going to be what propels us to start to address the fact that it is just a pricing problem and maybe there needs to be some oversight.

Kyle Murphy: This is like the first time we recorded Headlines and it was the most negative, cynical thing we did-

Kelsey Waddill: It was so negative.

Kyle Murphy: ... and you and I were so smug. We were like, "we're never going to do that again," so yeah.

Sara Heath: Yeah.

Kyle Murphy: We're like, we're never going to do that again.

Sara Heath: Yeah.

Kyle Murphy: We're like, we're never going to do that again.

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah. Right. And then we did, and it worked out.

Kyle Murphy: So just let me know if you want me to rerecord my part.

Kelsey Waddill: Rerecord this whole thing.

Kyle Murphy: Yeah. Rerecord the whole thing and have a more positive conversation.

Kelsey Waddill: Well, moving away from these more dour themes here, I did want to just end on a high note here and ask, what are people excited about for this coming year? What are you hearing that is, we're excited to move into this space, we're optimistic about this certain strategy?

Anuja Vaidya: Sure. I think I did speak quite a bit about things that haven't been working as well, or virtual care use just like dipping in various areas. But I think one area where we really have seen it live up to all that hype is in mental healthcare, and I think that is a huge win for the country. Because, Lord knows, we all need a little bit of help, especially in this post-pandemic or somewhat post-pandemic world.

But that has really been where we've seen telehealth, virtual care really live up, like I said, to its hype. And we're still seeing huge use of virtual visits to extend mental health care, especially in areas where we don't have mental health resources readily available.

And, of course, there are still the issues of tech equity, like we mentioned early on. It's not perfect, but it's definitely I think a big positive win.

And then I think the other thing too is a lot of moving care outside of the hospital, that sort of movement that started, probably before the pandemic, but really kicked into higher gear during. Hospital at home care for instance is also I think still really popular. As of November 21st, CMS said that 305 hospitals across 37 states are participating in its Acute Hospital Care at Home program. And so that number is just going up. And we've had a few early results from that program showing that it is reducing mortality rates, it is reducing unnecessary hospitalizations.

All good news I think in my book. I think the more that we can get--overused phrase, but...I do think it's important of meeting patients where they are and making care really truly accessible. And I think these are two bright spots in ways in which that's happening.

Sara Heath: I'm excited about where we are with health equity and its cousin, social determinants. I feel like, of course we haven't fixed health equity. We still have health disparities, centuries of racism and slavery.... We haven't fixed it yet.

But I think a lot more organizations are putting their money where their mouth is. We are no longer having to be like, "Here's a disparity, here's a disparity, here's a disparity." We're finally taking action, creating our roadmaps. It's going to take a while for us to calibrate the best way to actually move the needle, but I think there aren't too many large organizations that are resisting it or holding back anymore. And there are actually a lot of organizations that are, "Hey, we've done this for three years, so we don't have it perfect, but we're going to share the results that we have so far." We're seeing some places be able to better implement cultural competency and implicit bias training, which is really huge.

So it's really less of an "if" with organizations and more of a "all right, let's wait the period of time that we have to wait to see the actual intangible ROI on this." And I think a lot of places, while there are still challenges in terms of we don't necessarily have the demographic data available to measure health disparities, I think a lot of places are like, "But we want it and we're trying."

So the desire to be able to deliver on this is definitely exciting, and I think that's a good first step, all getting on the same page of that.

Kelsey Waddill: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, I think I can echo a little bit in terms of just the organizations being able to see what works, and now it's just a matter of implementing it and at a wide enough level to make a difference.

Humana just came out with their Medicare Advantage value-based care assessment, and it was really encouraging to see how much these value-based care arrangements are still delivering good results. They had 70% of their Medicare Advantage plan members were aligned with a VBC provider. They had better rates of care coordination for those who are in value-based care arrangements versus outside of value-based care arrangements. Lower inpatient admission rates.

These kinds of results are still coming up in the research. That's just one payer, but I think that's pretty clear across the board that we know value-based care can work, and preventive care as a first step to lowering costs overall can work. And it's just a matter of digging into those strategies in the new year. And I think the fact that it's pretty widespread knowledge at this point means that we can spend less time recreating the wheel, and hopefully more time driving.

Thank you, Anuja and Sara and Kyle, for joining us today on Healthcare Strategies to talk about these predictions. And thank you all of our listeners for joining. If you have any thoughts or questions or ideas for stories that we should cover, please email us, and you can follow us on all of the platforms where you listen to podcasts.

All right. Happy New Year, everyone!

Anuja Vaidya: Happy New Year!

Sara Heath: Happy New Year!