It was a session short on talk of actual dollars, but investor money will keep flowing into digital healthcareunder certain conditions.

Thats the group consensus of four Wall Street bankers and a venture capital executive that spoke this morning in New York at the 2016 Digital Health Conference sponsored by the New York eHealth Collaborative.

For next year healthcare investorsespecially digital healthcare investorswill continue to look for start-up and growing technology companies that are developing consumer applications that solve problems, help to better structure predictive health information and better manage risk.

Despite looming healthcare reform promised by the incoming You-Know-Who administration and a Republican-dominated congress, consumerism is still a driving trend changing healthcare and a continued growth area for public and private investment. Regardless of what will happen, consumerization and retailization in healthcare wont go away, says WebMD senior vice president and head of corporate and business development Jason Holden. There is no abating consumers hungry for information and for providers of core information.

There are multiple health technology companies that already provide software and services to help healthcare organizations interpret data, says Health Enterprise Partners partner David Tamburri.

But where Wall Street bankers see a lot of investment dollars flowing next year is into digital healthcare and information companies that develop applications and tools that integrate and use data in areas such as preventive medicine and predictive outcomes and analytics. Its who can do what with big data and unstructured data that will be big, Tamburri says. The amount of healthcare data being collected is doubling in size every 75 days.

Risk management is another big area of digital healthcare thats drawing the attention of investors as healthcare administrators and others look for information technology tools to deal with changing models of healthcare delivery, a shift from fee-for-service payment to models such as accountable care organizations, in which quality, cost and care are shared by groups of healthcare providers from different specialties covering a large patient population, and payments are made based on hitting certain outcomes standards or quality of care benchmarks. Investors are looking for companies that increase productivity and achieve greater levels of efficiency, says Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe senior executive Mark Tomaino.

Digital investors continue to look to invest in growing companies with annual revenue in the range of $3 million to $10 million that can be scaled to $25 million and more, the panelists noted. If your solution is narrow, best in class, is in the cloud and runs on Epic or Cerner, investors wont kick you out, Tomaino says. Epic Systems Corp. and Cerner Corp. are the biggest developers of electronic health records systems.

A start-up or young company that also has signed a major health insurer or health system as a customer also draws investor interest. It shows the company knows how to acquire customers, Tamburri says.