Giving Compass' Take:

· Shannon Muchmore discusses the shifting healthcare industry and the threats payers face when it comes to coverage.

· What would happen if companies skipped over insurers and went directly to providers? How would this change the healthcare field?

· Read more about the healthcare plans of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase.

Payers are watching all around them as the healthcare industry shifts. Digital and mobile health tools are becoming more commonplace, data and analysis are prized and more companies — some of them giant names — are mulling skipping insurers altogether and contracting directly with providers.

These themes dominated the talk at the annual America’s Health Insurance Plans conference in San Diego, along with further embrace of population health measures, market consolidation and a growing need to focus on customer service.

Some of the biggest news to make waves at the conference came before it even began, when Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway announced they had chosen the CEO for the company they are forming to address employee healthcare costs.

Their pick, surgery professor and author Atul Gawande, had been booked months earlier to speak about end-of-life care. While he declined to discuss the new role in any detail, he expressed excitement and said he’s up for the challenge. “We will come to a place where we can get scalable solutions that change the practice of medicine anywhere,” he said, adding: “It’s a long road but it clearly is possible.”

Barak Richman, business and law professor at Duke University, said elsewhere at the conference that the buzz from the three companies’ initial announcement told him people are looking toward outside actors to disrupt healthcare. With their previous successes in other industries, Amazon, JPM and BH have a chance to shake up the system. “There’s so much enthusiasm and so much intrigue behind it, even though they haven’t done anything yet,” he said.

Read the full article about the threats to payers of healthcare by Shannon Muchmore at Healthcare Dive.