A principal driver of the new health economy is the big data that companies are utilizing to make medicine more affordable and improve patient outcomes while reducing their costs.
The rise of personalised medicine is leading to significant and relatively rapid changes in a healthcare industry that has traditionally been slow moving and slow to change. This is impacting how patients interact with their healthcare, how medicine is paid for and even how industry organisations operate.
A principal driver of the new health economy is Big Data, which companies are utilising to make medicine more affordable and improve patient outcomes while reducing their costs. The focus on data and analytics will lead to new services and products that will begin to provide personalised, patient-centered healthcare options, which in turn will drive costs down for consumers using targeted analytics of large data sets, resulting in a more personalised approach to treatment.
Analytics and Big Data can provide better outcomes for patients and better, more innovative product strategies for pharma/medical device and healthcare providers.
A Data Advantage
Companies that have the most complete data and can ask the right questions of that data will be poised to reap significant value from the more consumer-focused healthcare market.
The ongoing changes due to the new health economy represent both significant potential benefits and new pitfalls for companies involved at every level of the healthcare industry.
This growth in the use of data helps resolve several difficult challenges in the healthcare industry. Healthcare businesses have struggled and mostly failed to find ways to use their large research and development (R&D) expenditures to drive down costs and increase returns on their investments. The focus on gathering data from multiple inputs and analysing those data sets to find targeted solutions allows businesses to determine how to act to correct inefficiencies in the production and marketing of their products.
Personalised medicine also represents a shift from healthcare being marketed to hospitals and service networks and now to individual patients. By vertically integrating multiple components of the supply chain, companies can gather information directly from patients both on their behaviors, wants and their needs.
Impact on Skill Sets Needed
Big Data also will provide significant new opportunities in functional areas including:
- Quality
- Risk assessment
- New product design
- Change management for existing players, especially with respect to Big Data and the critical analytics piece that is driving these changes
It will impact consumers directly both in cost of services and patient outcome and has already led to significant vertical consolidation of players in the healthcare industry. "A total of seven megadeals were announced in the first half of 2019, including four in the second quarter," notes PwC. "This brings us just one shy of the total number of megadeals in all of 2018."
Facing economic uncertainty, industry CEOs will take a cautious approach to hiring, notes PwC. Only 54 percent expect to increase the headcounts in their organisations in 2019, down from 71 percent in 2018.
To achieve flexibility while maintaining productivity, employers should consider more insourced solutions to ensure they can continue to perform this crucial work. Using a services provider such as Actalent can help healthcare organisations scale up and down easily while also enabling more focus on visibility and control into the process.
Want to learn more about the new health economy? Contact Actalent now.