In the face of competition from digital disrupters, the medtech industry needs to embrace digital healthcare platforms to deliver the services patients have come to expect.
Accenture recently interviewed 8,000 patients, and 63pc wanted more input into treatment decisions and would use patient services from life sciences companies if they were aware of them. Furthermore, more than 40pc of the millennial and Gen X cohorts stated that provision of personal services would be essential to convince them to switch to new treatments.
In a related study, Accenture interviewed 200 senior executives in pharma companies in the US and Europe, and found that nine out of 10 investments that have been made in patient services by these companies to date have delivered an above-average business impact. 95pc of pharma industry respondents plan to continue and 85pc plan to grow their investment in patient engagement technologies in the next 18 months.
With similar moves into healthcare and wellness by tech giants such as Google parent company Alphabet (Verily, DeepMind), the medtech industry faces intense competition in developing a suite of new products and services for patients. There are major questions for the medtech sector, such as: are they moving towards patient services that surround and support their products, enabling them to prove impact on patient health outcomes quickly enough? And are they embracing digital healthcare platforms, the tool of choice for developing collaborative partnerships across the broad ecosystem of stakeholders to deliver a better patient outcome?
