How innovation can unlock the power of data to deliver value-based care

Organizations have the tools to deliver a better personalized health experience, but the ecosystem needs to collaborate to build this future.

Despite the enormous potential of this vision, to date the industry has made only limited progress on the journey from the legacy “analog” health system of the past, through digitized and connected care to the truly smart health system of the future, the IHE. The major hurdle we face is not technological limitations, but human limitations. While technology is moving at an exponential rate, there is little movement on aligning the different needs of industry stakeholders. The ongoing misalignment in what stakeholders value, prioritize and invest in prevents us from moving towards the more connected ecosystem that can transform care.

Interoperable models can not only survive but thrive when stakeholders can access each other’s data, connecting and combining it with their own to create added value which is then shared back into the ecosystem. Once stakeholders understand this, the need for better alignment becomes obvious. Unfortunately, this is not the basis on which the industry’s historical business models have been built: this is the crux of the challenge for companies trying to realize a different, better future model.

Yet the different stakeholders are not in a zero-sum game. If they can recognize the interdependency in their aims and take such a collaborative approach, a major barrier to the IHE’s development will rapidly disappear. Instead of a model where large amounts of data are housed by different stakeholders, we need a model where stakeholders can make interdependent use of detailed data specific to an individual “patient journey” within a specific therapeutic area, using these data to make better decisions and achieve better outcomes for all.

Why value-based care can bring stakeholders together

The advantages of value-based care (VBC) have been widely recognized over the past decade and the principles of VBC are now readily accepted by most parties. The sticking point for VBC achieving scale is the question of “what is agreed to be valuable”. Interdependency in aim and agreement on value will give stakeholders a meaningful framework for understanding and building mutual shared value. VBC models enable this interdependency: they need to become the standard model for aligning stakeholders Without alignment via VBC the industry’s investment and innovation journey can be compared with a boat adrift without a rudder. Once VBC reaches scale, the industry can at last begin to steer the utilization of health technology towards the goal of delivering smart health in the IHE.

Today, the EY Intelligent Health Ecosystem Innovation Dashboard displays the current lack of direction in the industry’s pattern of investments into new technologies. While organizations have initiated a wide range of pilot programs with new technology in recent years, these programs have yet to mature to the scale and level of interoperability that could have game-changing implications. This lack of transformative success stories in turn deters organizations from making the big bets that can unleash the potential of these new technologies and kickstart a new wave of radical growth.

Consider three examples of new technologies that have won general acceptance and achieved some traction in the market.

• First, smart inhalers. These products take the traditional “analog” inhaler used to control respiratory disease and build sensors into it that can capture and feed data back about how the patient is using the medicine, with the aim of improving its effectiveness.
• Similarly, the implants that have long been used in joint replacements are now being augmented with installed sensors that can track how the patient’s progress with the new implant and communicate this data to a care team.
• And we have also seen an increased role for virtual care teams in the increased embrace of telemedicine and tools like chatbot-driven digital triage for patients.

Each of these three examples has enabled some improvements in care. Yet they have not caused any major revolution in respiratory care, joint replacement, or patient access to care. To understand why the impact has been incremental rather than radical, consider a pattern we see repeatedly in nature and in business alike: the S-curve. New products and innovations often deliver rapid growth as they achieve widespread adoption – then comes a period of stabilization and growth plateaus. At this point eventual decline and extinction lie ahead for the product. Organizations will often try to delay this fate, by refining the product, digitizing existing operating structures to enhance efficiencies and extend a product’s performance curve. The digitization of products and services in the Health Sciences and Wellness industry at present looks like an attempt to prolong the market life of these goods.

The real goal, however, should be not to delay but to avoid extinction. This needs organizations to be more ambitious and think beyond simply optimizing the existing product. They need to unlock innovation in a way that enables them to jump ahead to the next ascending s-curve of growth. This is challenging – what has contributed to success to date is unlikely to be the same in the future and investors both private and public (including governments as custodians for the public purse) demand returns.  In healthcare, such leap requires an ecosystem approach and alignment, enabled by VBC as described above. If the industry and its stakeholders can achieve this alignment, they can unlock positive feedback loops of innovation and adoption rising through successive waves of s-curve growth.

In this ecosystem approach, digital innovations will become more than stand-alone point solutions, connecting to a broader and more powerful system of data-driven, technology-delivered care. The smart inhaler and its data streams will become just part of a network of interlinked sensors providing better real-time care to the patient; for example, sensors in the home will analyze air quality and weather data, identifying respiratory risks and signalling the need for the patient to use the inhaler. In the further future, as the IHE becomes reality, detection, prediction, and intervention will happen still sooner, perhaps without needing any action from the patient: bio-electronic implants could detect neurological inflammatory triggers and disarm them before they become symptomatic.