4. It's about meeting the patients where they're at. "We have patients who maybe don't think about themselves as patients, but as consumers," said Wigginton. "They have different expectations of how they connect with the people around them and access information." For example, younger patients prefer to direct message a physician, as opposed to email or texting. "Other industries do this exceptionally well," Wigginton added. "Other industries apply IT to support interaction between them and their consumers, and they have very smart consumer-oriented solutions." It's important to learn from these approaches whenever possible, he said, not only to avoid "reinvention," but to also understand how these approaches translate into healthcare. "Whether they're driven from the regulatory environment, like HIPAA, or the reimbursement environment," he said. "You can't have services that essentially eradicate half of your service visits – you'll bankrupt your practice."

[See also: Data is key to population health management.]

5. We're not finished "experiencing innovation." If there's one thing we know for sure, said Wiggington, it's that the industry is nowhere near close to limiting the ways people communicate with one another. "We're not stopping face time," he said. "There's something after face time and there's something after tweeting and Facebook pages. We will continue to see innovation in the ways people get and process information." The future includes not only more innovation around reaching out to patients, he added, but also more convenience on the provider side. "The best of those services will offer consolidation," he said. "So for the physician, there will be an easy way to manage a patient panel who has different preferences." The consolidation, he predicts, will be the number one feature of physician/patient services. "There's difficulty in coordinating all that, and making sure those things come back together is very critical."

Follow Michelle McNickle on Twitter, @Michelle_writes