The challenge of speed healthcare

The challenge of speed: HealthcareThe challenge of speed in healthcare as technology puts its foot on the accelerator The healthcare sector needs to change faster.. There is pressure to

The challenge of speed: Healthcare

The challenge of speed in healthcare as technology puts its foot

on the accelerator

The healthcare sector needs to change faster There is pressure to improve existing administrative

processes and interoperability between systems, while at the same time increasing the awareness of

patients and the skills of healthcare professionals How else can the sector modernise quickly enough

to deliver the preventive medicines and personal health support required to meet the growing demand?

In a survey conducted to better understand the speed of change, a mere 24% of healthcare

respondents said that they can rapidly adapt to unexpected market opportunities This explains why

98% of those surveyed are feeling at least some level of personal pressure to adapt to rapid changes

Technology change is fuelling this pressure to adapt ever more quickly Respondents in the survey

believe that new technology platforms will have the biggest impact on their business models over the

next three years, in particular the growth of data and analytics

But as the experts interviewed for this report explain, real agility for the healthcare sector requires

that organisations learn to adapt their core business processes while mastering their use of

technology This, many healthcare executives believe, will be where they will see the greatest change in

the coming years, and where most value can be delivered

AN ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT RESEARCH PROGRAMME SPONSORED BY

presidents or directors In addition, The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted four in-depth interviews with healthcare leaders, as well as substantial desk research

This article aims to offer some guidance to managers in healthcare hoping to drive greater process speed and harness the potential of changing technologies to better serve their organisational goals

The report is based on a survey of 461 senior,

Europe-based executives Of these, 59 work

in the healthcare sector, including hospitals,

medical equipment manufacturers and

pharmaceutical companies More than half

(52%) of respondent companies have annual

incomes over US$500m The survey sample

is senior, with 49% at C-level or above, and

a further 23% senior vice presidents, vice

About the research

Europe’s healthcare future is digital

Healthcare reform and the need to change are not new But the EU’s most recent eHealth action plan, unveiled in 2012, is moving things forward more quickly This plan supports the use of digital technology to transform the healthcare sector As the European Commission affirms: “Because Europeans live longer than ever, and because of new and expensive treatments, the costs of health and social care will rise substantially to about 9% of EU GDP in 2050 ICT can be our most powerful ally to maintain cost-efficient and high-quality health and social care, as it empowers people of every age to better manage their health and quality of life, in any place.”

Already, many patients and health professionals are using telehealth solutions—the delivery of health services and information over digital networks And millions of Europeans have downloaded smartphone apps to keep track of their health and wellbeing “A lot of the change is focused on lifestyle and prevention, keeping healthy people healthy, and is fuelled by personal empowerment,

by mobile apps and self-tracking It’s bottom-up,” says Claus Burci Nielsen, vice chair of the Continua Health Alliance, an international, non-profit organisation which promotes “plug and play” standards for digital healthcare data

Yet in some ways this may not be coming fast enough Peter Ohnemus, the chief executive officer of Dacadoo, a health-tracking company based in Switzerland, warns: “Europe had the lead in mobile

in the 1990s (with Siemens, Philips, Nokia, Alcatel and Ericsson) and lost it Digital healthcare will turn out to be exactly the same if Europe is not moving its innovation forward and leaving the politics behind Digital health is driven by the consumers.”

The EU’s action plan attempts to increase the pace of change and improvement in healthcare by focusing on three areas: broader deployment of telemedicine, increased patient access to healthcare data, and improved interoperability across systems

This latter concern is especially acute: in the survey, healthcare executives lead all other industries in citing “effectively linking our technology platforms” as a key bottleneck to increasing agility, with 42%

saying it is holding back their efforts to change

Accelerating core processes

When asked where they expect to see the most change in the next three years, 41% of healthcare executives cite “improving their core business processes” This is also the area of change most frequently described as “crucial to their business”, alongside recruitment, customer retention and supply-chain optimisation

Clearly, both the flexibility and the speed of core processes are central to the agility of the organisation So how prepared is the healthcare sector? Healthcare executives are notably more

confident of their ability to adapt their core processes than the average across all sectors (35%), with

51% believing they are faster than their competitors

And while the healthcare sector has a reputation for being bureaucratic and the many-layered, siloed

structure of bureaucracies can hinder agility, respondents are less likely to list “bureaucratic process

controls” among their gravest barriers to increasing process speed They tend to emphasis the lack

of a clear business objective, time constraints of relevant business executives, and legacy technology

platforms

Indeed, technology offers constraints as well as opportunities Respondents to the survey identify

technology as the functional area where changing at speed poses at risk, and “effectively linking all

our technology platforms” is seen as the number one bottleneck to achieving greater agility

As these statistics reveal, getting IT right for healthcare systems is challenging Part of this is

platform-specific “Enterprise technology hasn’t kept up with the way people access data now,” says

Mr Nielsen “The younger generation does everything on mobile phones or tablets Government

and regional services require logging in on an old-fashioned laptop or desktop Everyone says that

accessing health data will come easily to young people, but I think the reality is the opposite unless we

rapidly keep up with the technology that people are actually using.”

How would you estimate your organisations speed in the following: Adapting your core business

processes Please select the most appropriate

(%)

All Healthcare

Faster The same

Slower

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit.

20

38

50

35

Adapting technology platforms is a must, however The majority of healthcare executives (51%) list

“technology platforms” among the aspects of their business model they expect to change most over the next three years, compared with 41% across all sectors

Opportunities in technology

If companies do not manage it appropriately, technology can be both a barrier to change and a change-driver, in that it is reshaping market conditions and patient expectations But, of course, technology can also be a competitive differentiator, if healthcare companies can adopt it and adapt to

it fast enough

When asked which technologies would have the biggest potential to improve healthcare over the next three years, two responses stand out Among healthcare executives, 42% choose data analytics (versus 29% for respondents from all sectors), while 31% opt for the Internet of Things (versus 16% for the broader group) Healthcare is the only industry sector surveyed that focuses on the Internet of Things,

an area of innovation that bridges the physical and the digital

Top ten changes in business model - next three years

(%)

All Healthcare

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit.

Composition of your

17 19

22 24

34

51

22

31

20

32

41

floodgate of real-time data that can be analysed in order to improve research results, health outcomes

or any high-stakes process in which an intervention leads to some beneficial result

Some healthcare companies are looking to other industries to learn how to cope with the growing

“velocity” of data (the speed with which it is produced and how fast it needs to be analysed)

”We have a partnership with McLaren (a high-performance automotive business), which is a very

data-driven company They make instant decisions about the performance of their cars and drivers by

collecting and analysing data in real time,” says Steve Mayhew, head of R&D strategy development at

GlaxoSmithKline in the UK “There are parallels in our industry The ability to collect and analyse large

and complex data sets can be used by healthcare companies like GSK to collect patient data remotely

and continuously in order to better understand the effects of our medicines We can respond more

quickly than through our standard clinical trial model.”

Indeed, by using data and analysis in a more agile fashion, healthcare companies are addressing

another critical risk factor identified by the survey: research and development (R&D) Over one-third of

healthcare respondents (36%) identify R&D as an area where changing at speed poses a risk, twice the

18% average across all sectors

GlaxoSmithKline, for example, is using more frequent analysis to de-risk drug trials, an expensive

component of drug development “When we’ve done a research study or clinical study to test a

hypothesis, we usually have to wait until the end of the study to see the analysis of the data,” says Dr

Mayhew “I think we’re now coming to the point of collecting and monitoring the data in a continuous

way, so we can make decisions during the study, not just afterwards.” But to really drive value for the

business requires changes to the way the organisation works As Dr Mayhew explains: “We’ve created

a number of smaller, more flexible units within our early-stage research environment as well as our

clinical development environment Those units specialise in particular scientific disciplines That allows

us to quickly scale up investments when they’re promising and scale them down if they don’t play out

as we anticipated.”

Stephen Cleaver, executive director of informatics systems at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical

Research (NIBR), argues that providing research scientists with the analytical software tools they need

allows them to answer more questions, faster Technologies such as gene sequencing are producing

more biomedical research data than ever before, and the methods used to analyse these data are

evolving rapidly

He has therefore made sure that the company’s software development processes are as agile as possible

If a researcher wants to look at the data in a certain way, the informatics systems team will quickly

produce a user interface that allows them to explore the possibilities without waiting weeks or months

In order to do this, however, the team has to integrate a variety of data sets whose size and complexity

are growing rapidly by the day According to Dr Cleaver: “Data integration is the real key for all of this.”

There are risks involved in operating at greater speed, but healthcare organisations are only beginning to tap into the potential benefits Europe’s healthcare sector has the opportunity for still greater gains This year should see the development of the legal framework for the EU’s eHealth interoperability initiatives and larger-scale integration of crossborder health services through the seed funding and technical assistance of the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility This should more closely integrate the single market for health services in Europe and help deliver better health outcomes for Europe’s patients

The examples in this article emphasise the need to keep up with healthcare’s accelerating pace of change While there is no clear consensus on what should be prioritised first, respondents surveyed tend to expect major changes to come from improving their core processes, and they agree that technology platforms will probably have the biggest impact on their business models Harnessing greater speed will require more effective data integration and real-time monitoring But leveraging the gains from new technology requires organisational structures that are able to adapt and scale up quickly to respond to the organisation’s changing opportunities Ultimately, being faster isn’t about winning a race, it’s about delivering better healthcare

About the sponsor

Ricoh provides technology and services that

can help organisations worldwide to optimise

business document processes Offerings

include managed document services,

production printing, office solutions and IT

services

www.ricoh-europe.com

Whilst every effort has been taken to verify the accuracy of this information, neither The Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd nor the sponsor of this report can accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this white paper or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out

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