The Digital Transformation of Healthcare
BY DIRK LAMMERTS · NOVEMBER 2, 2015
The entire world has gone digital:
- Access to information – digital: Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia
- Social interactions – digital: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram
- Networking – digital: LinkedIn
- Collaboration – digital: Yammer, Slack
- Marketplaces & transactions – digital: eBay, OpenTable, Kayak, TaskRabbit
- Delivery of content – digital: iTunes, YouTube, Pandora
And in cases where physical goods or services are involved, there is a smooth online-offline transition: Uber, Airbnb, Instacart.
Healthcare Needs to Catch Up
The entire world? Almost. Healthcare is one of the last remaining industries using paper- pencil and analog technologies. A 2012 survey revealed that the phone was the preferred means of physician-to-physician (95%) and physician-to-patient (91%) communication, followed by fax (63%) and in-person (58%) for communication between physicians and in person (84%) for communication with patients [1].
The low utilization of digital technologies has not only made dealing with the healthcare system inconvenient. It has also perpetuated healthcare as one of the most inefficient industries. In a worldwide comparison of 10 major industries, healthcare was the single most inefficient industry with more than 40% or USD 2.5 trillion wasted annually on a global scale [2].
The Change in Healthcare
This picture has started to change over the past five years. Biosensors, mobile devices, data analytics, telemedicine platforms, patient engagement apps, dedicated social networks (connecting patients, physician peer networks, and social connectivity across care teams), transparency tools, and marketplaces to transact healthcare services have started to “digitize” healthcare.
Venture funding for digital health companies surpassed $2 billion in the U.S. in the first six months of 2015; on track to match the 2014 record of $4.3 billion [3]. The top six categories in the first half of 2015 were: wearables and biosensors, analytics and big data, healthcare consumer engagement, telemedicine, enterprise wellness, and EHR and clinical workflow. These categories represent consumer-facing digital health solutions as well as technologies improving the performance of healthcare delivery and systems.
Healthcare Startups
In addition to digital health innovation driven by startups, big technology players started to move into this space. Apple launched HealthKit and ResearchKit, and the Apple Watch includes an optical heart rate sensor. Samsung introduced the Simband wearable reference design and the SAMIIO data exchange platform as part of its “Voice of the Body” digital health initiative. And Google is pursuing a wide array of health-related initiatives ranging from the Baseline study aimed at understanding what it means to be healthy down to the molecular and cellular level, to glucose-sensing contact lenses, and storage and processing of DNA data on Google Cloud.
The traditional healthcare players, including provider systems, payors, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies are all evaluating digital technologies, piloting digitally enabled applications and exploring new service and revenue models in the digital healthcare economy.
The Future of Healthcare
Where will all this lead to? No single technology, no new business model has established itself as the new standard for a digital future of healthcare. The balance between traditional healthcare participants, patients/consumers, and technology/information/consumer electronics companies is shifting toward a new equilibrium that is still hard to predict. But what is becoming clear is that the world of fax machine and paper-pencil technologies in healthcare is over. It is increasingly replaced by the digitization of the human body, by data analytics tools generating insights from the new flood of biometric and contextual data, and by emerging marketplaces for transacting healthcare services. This all is driving a consumerization of healthcare like we have seen with many other disruptive innovations before – from the desktop copier to the personal computer to retail brokers.
[1] 2012 National Physicians Survey, Little Blue Book/Sharecare, 2012
[2] The World’s 4 Trillion Dollar Challenge, IBM Institute for Business Value, 2010
[3] Digital Health Funding 2015 Midyear Review, Rock Health, 2015
[2] The World’s 4 Trillion Dollar Challenge, IBM Institute for Business Value, 2010
[3] Digital Health Funding 2015 Midyear Review, Rock Health, 2015
- By: Dirk LammertsDirk is the founder and CEO of myNEXT, a management consulting firm assisting companies ranging from Fortune 500 to startups in shaping the future by leveraging disruptive technologies and building new businesses. He is also an advisor to high tech, consumer electronics, healthcare, and life sciences clients.
No comments:
Post a Comment