Ecosystem evolution enabled by technology – an example in Healthcare

Healthcare is changing – fast

The search for new business models for the Pharmaceutical industry is being driven by a number of factors:

1. Society’s healthcare burden is growing due to populations that are living longer (and being unwell for longer)
2. Payors want to now pay for outcomes from medicines not just for the pills
3. Generics (launched after patent expiry) are cutting the value of established brands and markets
4. Pharma R&D is not producing the blockbusters companies have needed to support their revenues
5. Pharmaceutical companies are looking to switch roles from being pure manufacturers to service providers delivering outcomes

Is personalised medicine finally here?

IBM’s Smarter Planet concept – that increasing instrumentation and interconnections are making the world more intelligent – shows that by connecting healthcare devices such as pill dispensers, and health monitoring devices (e.g. glucose meters, etc), insight can be gained to health at the individual, and population scale.

Such insight would benefit multiple stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem:

Patients quantify their health outcomes, and Carers receive support through reminders. 
Healthcare providers gain insight to patient health, from which to recommend appropriate interventions.  Payors benefit from lower healthcare costs and focus on patient outcomes

New players are going to change the health ecosystem

The large-scale, long-term deployment of this approach, based on an extensive collaboration between healthcare and technology could deliver:

1. Novel analytical techniques enabling patients, HCPs, and other stakeholders to act quickly 
2. Accelerated incorporation of analytics using advanced, predictive capabilities for pattern and context recognition into health assessment
3. Value-based pricing for medicines based on pseudo real-time health outcomes data that will radically alter the way in which medicines are developed and priced by the pharmaceutical industry.

Contact: Amer Fasihi