How health care companies can capture value in the future

As a fourth industrial revolution unfolds, health is being reimagined in ways that fuse the biological, digital and physical worlds.

The ubiquity of data and analytics today means that every company is now a technology company.  We are now able to connect disparate types of data, so we can soon expect human-led algorithms to yield unprecedented insights into the nature of health and disease. In the future, organizations from every sector will develop products, including algorithms, to improve health outcomes.

That’s why we’re excited to be talking about the future of healthcare at Innovation Realized in Amsterdam this month. But before discussing how organizations can take advantage of this convergence, it’s useful to understand why it’s happening.

Convergence in health care

A number of factors are driving convergence – which we refer to as Precision Health 4.0:

• Globally, people are living longer, but they are not living better: As more individuals develop chronic diseases such as diabetes or heart disease, there is a growing gap between lifespan (how long we live) and health span (how long we stay healthy).  As a result, the complexity of care and its costs are increasing.  For example, in Japan, men on average live 9 years with at least one disease before dying, while women live 12 years.

• The rise of health’s super consumers: In the retail and financial industries, consumers are becoming super consumers, expecting anytime, anywhere access to personalized products and services.  These consumers are using their ability to share unprecedented amounts of information to drive business change in the retail, banking and transportation industries.  Increasingly, these super consumers will make similar demands about their health care, radically changing the health services landscape. 
• Ubiquity of data: As medical data are connected and combined with data from wearables and other sources, there is an opportunity to use analytics and deep learning algorithms to generate new insights about the nature of health and disease. Data portability, helped by pervasive mobile access, blockchain-enabled technologies and artificial intelligence, brings super consumers closer to their health data and empowers their choices.

A power shift

These factors are also redefining how value is created. In today’s fluid environment, power is shifting away from traditional health care incumbents towards consumers and new entrants.

Organizations that facilitate the creation and the use of data-fuelled insights will capture the new value created by models that focus on this demand side of care.

Innovation and data will rule

One of the primary areas for new value creation will focus on streamlining data sharing through the formation of consumer-centric platforms of care that collect, combine and synthesize data from a variety of sources to help better manage and prevent disease. Algorithms will be a backbone of these new platforms, enabling the combination of scientific, behavioral, economic and financial insights. These algorithms will be able to provide personalized and actionable information that affects health outcomes in real time.