Industry
Healthcare
Patient-centered Care: Health and Wellness Redefined
Life Sciences
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Consumer Packaged Goods and Distribution
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Highlights
- The disjointed, episodic, and inconvenient care we often experience today is on the cusp of disruption, rewired by the secure flow of data between partners in the healthcare ecosystem.
- We all have a role in rebuilding healthcare systems created for an analog age, as every value chain component needs to be completely reimagined.
- The impact of connected care on the structure of the healthcare sector is enormous. We set out to study how this space is evolving, and what that means for the various ecosystem players such as pharmaceutical and medtech manufacturers, pharmacies, healthcare professionals, and payers.
On this page
The future of care
Connected care offers a range of opportunities and benefits.
New partnerships will be forged, and new players will be created as the industry’s power dynamics evolve. Connected care will likely have a vast impact on the structure of the healthcare sector. While it is encouraging that technology building blocks exist to create a connected care ecosystem, a blueprint to orchestrate them to create new possibilities is still not in place. We all have a role in rebuilding healthcare systems, as every value chain component needs to be completely reimagined.
With this as the hypothesis, we conducted a global survey and spoke to 375 senior decision-makers and influencers at organizations in five key healthcare industry sub-sectors on their thoughts on connected care.
75 participants were drawn from each sub-sector: healthcare providers (HCPs), payers, pharmacies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and medtech providers. While 49% were in the C-Suite, 51% reported directly to the C-Suite. The survey was conducted across three geographies: North America (40%), Europe (40%), rest of the world (20%).
Read our research report on enabling patient-centric, value-based healthcare where every stakeholder plays a role in reinvention and innovation.
The ecosystem must work in unison
While opportunities abound for every healthcare player, connected care calls for the holistic reimagination of the entire healthcare system.
60% of respondents believe the practices of healthcare providers must be reinvented to make connected care a reality, and 69% believe pharmacies can play a broader role. 88% think pharmacies become the primary point of care, 88% foresee dispensing precision medicine, and 84% think pharmacies can monitor patients’ health. Connected care can help payers simplify processes, manage costs, improve member experiences, and sustain and grow their top and bottom lines.
Making connected care work
Healthcare professionals play a pivotal role here, and a majority recognize that their practices need a complete rethink to make connected care a reality.
Funding models that do not incentivize investment are one of the topmost concerns of healthcare professionals (HCPs). From their perspective, enablers of value-based connected care include training on connected care devices, remote monitoring, and consultation.
The health system in which the HCPs operate and the incentives it offers will determine how process transformation for HCPs plays out on the ground. But the whole ecosystem has a role in this as well. The intricate and complex healthcare value chain must evolve for favorable patient outcomes.
The untapped potential of pharmacies
Pharmacies can reinvent the economics of connected healthcare provision. They can also assist with the handoff between HCPs and patients and facilitate ongoing care, improving care accessibility.
Pharmacies call out connected devices capable of remote patient monitoring, access to patient healthcare records, reimagined funding models, and support to develop their technological capabilities as prerequisites for them to offer new services. Large language models (LLM) based virtual assistants can aid pharmacies in medication management.
The payoff for payers
With connected care, new models for healthcare delivery and patient engagement will help payers cut costs, improve the member experience, and serve as a powerful motivator for adopting digital technologies.
Connected care allows payers to establish value-based care underpinned by AI, the internet of things (IoT), and improved mobile connectivity through 5G or 6G. In addition, hyperscale cloud services have tremendous potential to disrupt today’s healthcare value chain. Automated coding, creating empathetic member messaging in various languages and reading levels for explanation of benefits (EOBs), and summarization of regulations that align with payer's process transformation priority are all now possible with LLMs.
Such new healthcare models will only work if the processes that underpin them are legitimized by payers’ policies. Given this fact, their influence, and reach, payers will have a huge say in the success of connected care. They can catalyze collaboration among various stakeholders in the connected care ecosystem to overcome barriers to progress.
Pharma leaders all for ushering in smarter and safer medicine
For precision medicine to be rolled out faster and made more available in more places, reliable access to patient records is vital (it is chosen as a priority by 55% of respondents), as is the availability of AI and advanced computation tools, essential for mining vast troves of genomics data (52%). 80% of pharma leaders expect precision medicine to prevent adverse side effects.
Almost 65% of survey respondents agree it will allow pharma to develop value-based contracting and pricing models further and faster. Pharma can also reap additional and significant cost savings by harnessing AI to drive down clinical trial costs, according to 63% of our survey respondents.
AI top value driver for medtech; can disrupt every stage of the healthcare value chain
While 63% of medtech providers ranked AI in their top three value drivers and payers are also convinced of AI’s potential in healthcare provision, only 32% of HCPs see AI among their top value drivers.
44% expect AI that helps HCPs to ‘screen and triage patients’ and ‘streamline care by automating repetitive tasks’ to be one of the three greatest value drivers of connected care, more than any other capability.
Healthcare providers’ hesitation to adopt AI is one of the major impediments to the success of connected care. But, with the advent of generative AI, this might change. Their workflows can be streamlined by the patient communication assistant and by automating administrative tasks like clinical notes drafting and other documentation, real-time scheduling, data analysis, and so on, freeing up their time to focus more on patient care. GenAI-based LLMs and the orchestration of care through FHIR resources can significantly transform connected care.
Unlock a new era
The success of connected care depends on many parameters outside the control of providers and their value chain partners, such as communications infrastructure.
Connected care solutions are complex and involve multiple participants. However, if the stakeholders engage patients separately and without coordination, they are unlikely to win trust and cooperation. Collaboration is key to making connected care deliver its groundbreaking potential.
Enable connected care by elevating the healthcare ecosystem with forward-thinking strategies, such as transitioning from merely controlling data to controlling the right questions. This would foster seamless data flow within the organization and among different players, unlocking a new era of interconnected care and collaboration.