Health care is undergoing exponential change, and this year we’ll continue to see the industry launch bold missions to improve the patient experience. With new types of data and technologies, the vision of making health care more personalized and proactive is becoming closer to reality.

In my new book “The Patient Revolution: How Big Data and Analytics are Transforming the Patient Experience,” light is shed on several innovations shaping the future of health care; some of which we’ll see advance in 2016:

Personal health clouds
In the world of connectivity and digitization, personal health clouds push and pull data to and from your everyday devices; be it your phone, your wearable device, or even your refrigerator! It’s all part of the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon, and being able to connect all of the information related to your health will help you and those involved in your health to make better, more personalized health care decisions.

Machine learning
By creating big data health clouds and using machine learning technologies, we’ll be able to automatically predict and prescribe. Whether it’s making personalized diagnostics possible, or creating recommendation engines, like those of Amazon and Netflix, to recommend the best personalized feedback to healthcare consumers, we’ll see machine learning gain fresh momentum with the explosion of health data.

Behavior change platforms
Detrimental behaviors like poor medication adherence and smoking not only have negative health impacts, but also cost the health care system a fortune. We need effective ways to support healthy behaviors, and that challenge introduces exciting opportunities for data analytics. For example, using population health analytics will help health plans and providers to effectively engage and support individuals outside of the clinical setting, and analytics tools that help guide behavior, rather than simply track it, will give individuals the personalized guidance they need to create healthy behaviors.

I’m excited to see these innovations in action this year and hope you’ll read more about them in my book. Next week I’ll share more tidbits from The Patient Revolution and in the meantime, be sure to check out this video: