Digitisation has already changed most industries – now it’s changing the way the medical world works too. There is a huge impact on the way that the pharma world is starting to interact with its payers as well as with doctors and patients. Also drug makers have started to seek out new personality traits and completely different skill sets in its employees. What is the industry looking for? What’s next?
Germany’s Merck, for example, last year appointed a 30-year-old as its first chief digital officer. James Kugler comes from a tech background and has a biomedical engineering degree.
Boehringer Ingelheim, Europe’s largest private drug maker, has hired Simone Menne as its chief financial officer. Menne came from the very different world of aviation. Her previous job was with the airline Lufthansa. She is now recruiting software developers and data specialists in her new role at the head of a digital “lab”.
On the other hand, start-ups have been emerging in a variety of medical niches working on data to empower researchers to share and also on digital care solutions, like Sage Bionetworks, Precise.ly and Patients Like Me. Also Xealth has launched a digital prescribing platform which allows doctors to prescribe exercise programs, educational videos, apps and services, as well as good old-fashioned pills.
What is very much at issue with medical startups is who is in control of the medical data. Historically, a hallmark of American culture was considered to be that consumers enjoyed exercising their rights, but this never really grabbed hold in the area of health.
US consumers have previously seemed willing to allow doctors to lord it over their records and keep them private.
Now there are three factors that are increasingly having an effect on the old assumptions. The cost of medical diagnostics has fallen, meaning they have become much more accessible for the public to get hold of, which allows them to get around the doctors and old-fashioned healthcare businesses.
Start-ups like Theranos are not just running blood tests at a fraction of the old cost, but they are also offering DNA sequencing for $1,000 per genome or less. Back in 2001 the cost was $100m…
In the meantime, consumers have also become very comfortable with managing their health online. The Pew Research Center says that in excess of 33% of consumers currently check their health matters in cyber space.
This attitude shift, coupled with the rise of personal fitness gadgets like Fitbit, has reinforced the change. It has shown consumers what they can do with just their smartphones on their own.
There have been signs that consumer attitudes are changing in other ways too. Until very recently, the assumption of the healthcare establishment was that patients would put up strong resistance to their data being put online or shared too widely.
But there are indicators that show consumers have far fewer privacy concerns than a lot of civil liberty activists had hoped. For example, Randall Stephenson, US telecoms group AT&T’s CEO, is on record saying his customers are happy to waive privacy restrictions on the use of their broadband data for a monthly $20 discount on their bills. Medical diagnostic companies believe consumers are just as willing to share healthcare data, in return for either cheaper services or the belief that their information is helping to improve medical outcomes.
The implication is that if consumers are controlling data, rather than health practitioners, the medical profession may have to change its model. Services may come to be shaped by consumers’ own definitions of their own health, instead of services being arranged according to doctors’ training.
If consumers do allow their data to be put on centrally maintained databases, this may enable medical researchers to create databases that take in the whole population for research purposes. Iceland already has this facility, but in the US medical data is kept in a fragmented way. This is partly due to privacy concerns but also because collaboration has been hampered by powerful commercial interests.
If this consumer-controlled diagnostics trend speeds up, the dynamics could change. Indeed, Oregon Health and Science University director Brian Druker believes that in the next three years the US will be able to boast about its first unified cancer record databank.
The obstacles to this include those states that do not allow their consumers to have access to their data. Another is that prevention of cyber attacks needs to be much more strongly perceived if consumers are to trust in digital healthcare data.
What history has shown is that when global consumers are given a sense of agency, and they are also given the opportunity of acting with their wallets — the phenomenon of disintermediation, where the use of intermediaries between producers and consumers is reduced, can sometimes come about at surprising speed. Just take a look at Uber.
The post How Medical Startups Are Shaping Our Health appeared first on Eureka.
