How technology can make you live longer and healthier

What is digitalisation doing to healthcare? Is new technology making patient care more expensive or cheaper? And who’s going to pay for that?

We bring three experts around the table, EY partner Lucien De Busscher, technology expert Peter Hinssen and consumer expert Jo Caudron, to talk about digitization in health care.

Lucien De Busscher: The relationship between doctor and patient is definitely changing. The patient has become a super consumer. A good example of this: my 80-year-old mother, who’s a trained chef, recently asked her doctor for a different beta-blocker, because it was better. She’d looked it up online and found it through friends in a chat group.

Peter Hinssen: It’s not just digitalization, the patient is more central too, and part of a network. One of my favorite businesses is MyHealthTeams: they develop online patient groups around a disease or condition who share experiences of products and treatments and support each other mentally.

Jo Caudron: Consumers are more in the driver’s seat, their expectations have changed. But hospitals and doctors are still very inward focussed.

Peter Hinssen: I think it’s exciting: new players are coming along, with new ideas and new concepts. In the US, where the employer plays a major role – because they pay in the end – you can see the creativity of start-ups more clearly. Omada Health, for example, is a company that works around obesity and diabetes. They go to an employer and say: 3 percent of your tens of thousands of employees are morbidly obese and that’ll cost you tens of millions. So, Omada coaches those employees, and makes sure they lose weight. Finally, they do a fantastic deal with the employer: ‘Look, you’ve saved this much and we want a share of that.’ That’s creativity. 

How is EY involved in life sciences exactly?

Lucien De Busscher: We’re involved in exciting projects that grab the imagination. For example, we support severely depressed, suicidal patients and follow them throughout the patient pathway. We have some patients who are seeing light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in twenty years. That gives us great satisfaction. Even though it’s not something you’d immediately associate with the job of a consultant.