With our unique focus on the Life Sciences and Healthcare sectors, we've stayed at the forefront of current trends and developments in these industries. Growing alongside our clients over the last two decades has given us a unique inside view and understanding of the specific challenges, needs and successful transformation approaches of key players.
This whitepaper is a distillation of our observations of current and future developments in healthcare. Through many interactions at the executive level of hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical and medtech companies, we have honed our strategic view on what will be the next necessary step for healthcare delivery: the truly virtualized health campus 2030.
In the following paragraphs we will describe the most influential trends, followed by the guiding principles resulting from these trends. We will then present our vision of what the health campus might look like in 10 years' time if the imperatives and principles are followed.
Demographic developments in the next 10 years
Over the next 10 years, the bulk of the relevant patient population will be formed by the currently 40-60 year olds. This demographic has already become accustomed to a variety of digital service offerings and convenience tools. Of note is the growing use of social media, lifestyle apps, streaming services, and others such as e-banking or e-commerce, which have become part of a daily routine for many.
Moreover, wearable devices with the capability to monitor various health parameters are increasingly found in consumer products and are already amassing large sets of data on individuals. An omnipresent example is the simple step counter, which can now be found in cell phones, smart watches, smart rings, hearing aids, and other devices.
Along with the increasing use of digital services and the availability of personalized health-related data, a new data economy is already being built. Tech companies are realizing the value of consumer trust for data privacy and ownership. For some, the key to a true data economy lies in the use of blockchain technology, to ensure a truly decentralized yet trustworthy and secure data sharing system.
Future patients will expect, as a matter of course, digital healthcare services to prevent or better manage diseases based on the wealth of their personal data.
1. Focus On general practitioners
A reversal of a long-term trend in healthcare is beginning. Specialization used to be the only way to deal with the increasing wealth and complexity of healthcare data and evidence.
However, it is becoming clear that healthcare practitioners will not be able to keep pace with publication rates in their respective fields. Moreover, pure "pattern recognition" specialists, e.g. radiologists, are faced with an increasing data throughput, necessitated by high cost pressures. Novel digital tools, through machine learning, will be able to support practitioners by providing much needed, rapid insights based on all the available data. These tools will directly impact the focus of practitioners training and work, away from highly specialized tasks and towards broader patient engagement and overall disease management.
Following this trend, generalists will come into greater focus as first line providers who, supported by digital tools, will be able to solve ever more healthcare challenges for their patients. Through the same mechanism, many current support roles such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners and case managers may provide an even more cost effective first line of diagnosis and treatment.
Pharmacies as healthcare providers
Increasing the over-the-counter product portfolio and provision of healthcare services such as simple diagnostics and treatments have been classic ways to develop the pharmacy business. A further boost has been coming from the COVID-19 pandemic through pressure to provide testing and immunization to large segments of the population. In order to fully leverage this trend, pharmacies now need to integrate their services with other healthcare providers and evolve from a "pressure release valve for the necessities of public health" to a full partner in the new digital healthcare ecosystem.
2. Easily available therapeutic services
Traditional therapeutic services have two major drawbacks: low accessibility due to the necessity for correct diagnosis from an adequately trained physician, and secondly, the greatly varying quality of the administered therapy.
What's more, many of these therapeutic services, such as cognitive behavioral therapies, nutritional therapy, physio- and ergotherapy, rely heavily on patient education and engagement.
Thus, boosted by the pandemic, the creation of digital, easily accessible therapeutic services has increased. Many digital mental health services have been introduced, in particular for dealing with mood disorders. Some of those have even received certifications as true medical devices, and are therefore covered by health insurance.
Patients and payers alike are showing interest in reimbursable therapeutic services that don't involve a primary physician, albeit for different reasons.
Telemedial services
Telemedical services are gaining popularity as a replacement for the primary patient contact. The trend, boosted by the pandemic, is still increasing, as access to a broad range of medical services can be improved for many patients and both the efficiency and effectiveness of patient encounters are rapidly improving. These services are also moving away from pure triage and towards a full replacement of the general practitioner's office through integration of ever more patient data, such as vital parameters derived from wearable and other personal, home-based devices.
Opportunities for near-/offshoring and for machine learning support through natural language processing may offer an answer to the rising cost pressures in healthcare.
Advancing care and care at home
As managing diseases becomes more complex and multifaceted, care for patients will need to keep up. Moreover, the shift from inpatient to outpatient care will increase due to cost pressures.
The palette of specialized services will have to expand, and the availability of homecare services with higher integration of healthcare providers will have to grow. A significantly improved coordination of efforts and better integration of healthcare data through digital tools will be necessary.
The approach of integrated homecare will allow to reap benefits in terms of vastly reduced costs, a higher healthcare efficiency and a much better reintegration of patients into their day-to-day lives
Industrial partners at the Point-of-Care
Initiatives from pharma and medtech companies are underway to identify and build service offerings for patients directly at the point-of-care. The idea is to provide truly personalized medicine, for example through 3D-printed medical devices or personalized medication as a solution to polypharmacy.
To this end, the point-of-care including healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations needs to be prepared for much tighter control in terms of regulatory compliance, supply chains, product manufacturing etc. for which skill and knowledge transfer as well as tighter integration with the industrial partner will become paramount.
Value-based healthcare
Healthcare efficacy and efficiency are topics of ongoing discussions between healthcare providers and payers. A resulting long-term idea has been to assess healthcare value by dividing outcomes (both patient-reported and clinician-reported) by full cycle costs. Though neither of these measurements is easily defined or assessed, ongoing efforts have increased availability of validated outcome measures as well as visibility on costs. Through a full view, facilitated by complete healthcare data integration, it will be possible to create pay-for-performance cost models as well as assess actual healthcare quality, which can then be more readily improved through dedicated processes.
3. New trends And what they mean for healthcare organizations
Moving away from the classical hospital setup, the healthcare organization of the future needs to accommodate all of the above trends to remain relevant and economically successful. By necessity it will thus be data driven, highly virtualized and encompassing in its virtual campus a large variety of partner services, including general practitioners, pharmacies and industrial point-of-care offers.
Telemedial services
Telemedical services are gaining popularity as a replacement for the primary patient contact. The trend, boosted by the pandemic, is still increasing, as access to a broad range of medical services can be improved for many patients and both the efficiency and effectiveness of patient encounters are rapidly improving. These services are also moving away from pure triage and towards a full replacement of the general practitioner's office through integration of ever more patient data, such as vital parameters derived from wearable and other personal, home-based devices.
Opportunities for near-/offshoring and for machine learning support through natural language processing may offer an answer to the rising cost pressures in healthcare.
Advancing care and care at home
As managing diseases becomes more complex and multifaceted, care for patients will need to keep up. Moreover, the shift from inpatient to outpatient care will increase due to cost pressures.
The palette of specialized services will have to expand, and the availability of homecare services with higher integration of healthcare providers will have to grow. A significantly improved coordination of efforts and better integration of healthcare data through digital tools will be necessary.
The approach of integrated homecare will allow to reap benefits in terms of vastly reduced costs, a higher healthcare efficiency and a much better reintegration of patients into their day-to-day lives
- All services will need to be aligned in vertical delivery modules instead of the classical horizontal spread. Only through this structure will it be possible to create a meaningful governance, performance monitoring and adaptable processes. Moreover, services will not exclusively depend on physical location, allowing for the full benefits of virtualization.
- The classical hospital ward, currently still a pillar of medical treatment, will become minimized and far more efficient thanks to the emphasis on outpatient treatment and care. Therefore, building the hospital of the future will require rethinking around the modular design and allowing specialized spaces for potential partners, thus creating a true health campus.
- The future HCO's data volumes will require rethinking consent and the full healthcare data economy. To increase trust, it may well be necessary to create decentralized data storages with clear data ownership for patients. At the same time, this wealth of data will allow to truly assess treatment quality and establish the value of care, thus enabling a pay-for-performance mindset.
- On the administrative side, it will become far easier to govern the fully virtualized service domains, possibly with the aid of artificial intelligence. A flexible split of responsibilities and accountability will create opportunities for capable administrators and at the same time will help create a more efficient and stringent service offering.
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