Reference no: EM132910284

Innovate Toward Health Experience, Not Just Healthcare

Technological innovation has pushed the consumer experience forward in banking, retail, entertainment and hospitality (among other industries) but has not yet broken through with health interactions. Whereas the experiences of a streaming service or even making a payment are seamless across devices and platforms, it is still difficult to get health systems to "talk" to each other. That is, however, changing - and fast.

The Covid-19 pandemic has facilitated rapid adoption of care beyond the constraints of the traditional health system, increasing and likely sustaining the demand for solutions that make healthcare more convenient, connected and personalized - such as artificial intelligence chatbots for triage or wearables to monitor vital signs. We are at the nascent stages of "health experience," a care system that prioritizes well-being that is more accessible, mobile and fluid across platforms.

At the patient level, health experience means an expansion of our understanding of wellness. Wellness will soon go beyond medical readouts and come to include air quality, consistency of sleep and other daily and at-home data, such as individual eating and exercise habits. Innovations in nanosensors will help enable this innovation, collecting the consumer health data necessary to deliver an enhanced and customized health experience.

Importantly, health experience is not about selling new treatments or products; it is a reorientation of care around the entire patient journey and the individual's quality of life. It is aimed at maximizing the confluence of innovations in delivery and data (e.g., blockchain and nanosensors) with innovations in health (e.g., genomics). In practice, three pillars of technological innovation lie at the core of health experience: human centricity, supply chains and data fluidity.

Technology is our way of rethinking and revising how we can apply solutions to our problems. And health is entering this dialogue in full - connecting medicine to modern infrastructures.

The Value Of Health Experience

Health providers, payors and biopharmaceutical companies alike are moving away from product-level thinking toward a relationship-centric service, with each patient's unique needs and their ease of care more thoroughly considered. Instead of the patient needing to coordinate their appointments, referrals, prescriptions and payments, a better system wraps the infrastructure around the patient, empowers them to direct their own care and facilitates outcomes on their behalf.

The value to patients is obvious - they receive better, personalized health outcomes and enjoy improved interactions with healthcare providers and hospitals. But it's important to see how patient value flows upstream and encourages technological innovation.

Consider the case of a biopharmaceutical company that is innovating around clinical trial processes. They are now leveraging remote monitoring to gather data from trial patients, removing the need for routine, invasive procedures in a hospital. This eases the burden of participation for clinicians and patients alike, leading to a better overall consumer experience. But it's not just experience. The company that successfully executes against this innovation can perform trials in a resource- and time-efficient manner and is therefore poised to attract more business.

Or, take a diagnostics company that helped with Covid-19 testing as an example. It might realize that its true competitive advantage is in accessibility (getting tests into doctors' hands and results to patients' phones), and so it now views itself as a medical infrastructure company. The whole value paradigm has shifted - the company now solves a different market problem.

Health experience is oriented around the person, and businesses can gain a competitive edge from aligning with this orientation themselves, with early entrants gaining competitive advantage and consumer trust.

Humans, Supply Chains And Data

So, how is the shift toward health experience playing out functionally?

The health system will grow to adapt around the patient, rather than the patient themselves having to adapt to a static and disparate physical care system. Direct care services, like telehealth, are coming to make this a reality.

Put another way, winning technologies will make each individual patient more visible with regards to their wellness and health information. In tandem, we anticipate that consumers will demand health services that prioritize them as patients more effectively.

A better supply chain - a faster and personalized delivery method - will be necessary to place humans at the center of a health experience system. That means a connected infrastructure across devices, providers and payors. This will not only improve where care is accessed but will also change what that care entails (i.e., mass customization).

And finally, data fluidity sits between patient centricity and supply chains. Medical data is difficult to share securely, and many parties along the value chain view data as a proprietary asset. As a result, patients are responsible for their care but are very limited in their ownership of data. 

The change will come as companies move from "owning" data to "accessing" it. Data should belong to the patient, after all, and is fruitless on its own - companies will derive greater value from gathering, sharing and using data to make health decisions on behalf of the patient.

Innovations in cell and gene therapies highlight these three principles well. These personalized therapies require data that travels across platforms and people constantly. They operate atop a complex web of providers, appropriately connected, all with the patient as the end delivery target.

By coming closer to individual patients, companies are optimizing their business and operating models. Current arrangements are not future-proofed - and today, working better for the end patient is protecting yourself from becoming obsolete. By adopting an innovation mindset and the technology to support it, the health industry is moving toward a more complete vision of care and, hopefully, better outcomes.

Module 8: The core problem (or system constraint) is responsible for many, many undesirable effects. The undesirable effects are a list of all the things around us that are not wanted. Elimination of the core problem will eliminate the undesirable effects.

How is the article above "Innovate Toward Health Experience, Not Just Healthcare" related to module 8 core problems or system constraints?