Today, smart pharma companies should be asking that same question about another major development: Connected Health. This combination of technology, circumstance, and mindset has the potential to transform a sector of the economy worth $2.8 trillion in the United States alone. The transformation will certainly involve established incumbents in the healthcare market, especially pharma companies, device and equipment manufacturers, healthcare providers, and insurers. It will also draw new entrants who will be eager to create new services and identify ways to reduce costs. Having little or no experience in healthcare may well give these new entrants an advantage—they will see the market with fresh eyes, allowing them to come up with innovative ways to create value.

This is just a taste of the things to come. The forces changing the dynamics of healthcare are far bigger than those that changed the advertising and entertainment industries. Longer lifespans and the growing prevalence of chronic disease are pushing costs up. Advances in medicine and pharmaceuticals are raising expectations, while the patent cliff is threatening traditional pharma business models. And there is a lot more at stake—healthcare truly is a matter of life and death.

To stay in business, pharma companies and other established healthcare players will have to deliver health outcomes as good as or better than before, while containing costs and maintaining business performance. New entrants don’t have to work from an established position in the healthcare market, with vested interests and revenue streams to protect. They can go wherever they want. They can focus on some part of what established players do, and do it faster, better, or more affordably. And they can spot the gaps that established players don’t even see to create new services faster than established players can move.

Healthcare providers such as pharma companies have been the primary guarantors of positive healthcare outcomes. But if they want to maintain this role, they will need to think beyond their habitual domains of drugs and clinical practice. They will need to develop services that help patients change their lifestyles, a major factor in chronic conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. They will need to find ways to help patients stick with their treatment regimen. This would have an immense impact on health outcomes since non-adherence rates are as high as 50 percent among patients with chronic illnesses. Healthcare providers will also need to create systems that enable them to monitor their patients in real time, and intervene quickly when required. In short, if healthcare providers want to stay relevant, they need to understand how to enhance the value they provide. This will almost certainly involve forging partnerships with outsiders and new entrants.

The bad news for pharma companies is that this form of Connected Health is alien to their way of thinking; it doesn’t fit their business model and requires skills that most don’t have in-house. The good news is that by creating Connected Health services, a pharma company can achieve several important objectives: improve the real-world outcomes of its drug portfolio; get closer to patients, thereby building greater brand awareness and esteem for the brand; increase the company’s value in the health outcomes that patients want; and create new opportunities for revenue streams.

With our unique insider/outsider perspective on healthcare, one of our key roles today is to help clients understand the full picture of Connected Health and how they can be part of it.  For any patient living with a chronic condition, drug therapies are an essential element of Connected Health. They are a pharma company’s credentials and they give the company the advantage of privileged access to the patient. But on their own, they are just momentary connections between the brand and the patient. They also face price resistance from payers and competition from generics.  The most obvious elements of Connected Health are the new generations of portable and wearable health gadgets—the growing variety of sensors that can track key metrics such as body temperature, heart rate, blood sugar levels, and oxygen saturation. These data provide the raw material for continuous health analytics—the sort of detailed health profile that was previously available only for hospitalized patients.  On their own, however, sensors are nothing special. Like most technologies, they’re becoming commoditized and have a short replacement cycle. Drug therapies and wearables certainly are important, but they are far from being the whole picture. Any company aspiring to harness the power of Connected Health needs all three advanced elements and a bigger aspiration.

In contrast, Connected Health is patient-centered. It focuses on understanding the person and the needs and problems caused by that person’s condition. The aspiration is to create experiences that deliver solutions for these needs.  Connected Health is grounded in the understanding that there is more to a drug than its clinical profile. Delivering effective healthcare should focus not only on objectively measurable disease parameters, but also on patients’ experiences of their condition and its treatment. Hence, Connected Health requires seeing drugs in a broader context: embedding them in experiences that help a patient with a specific condition deal more effectively
with the condition and live better with it. This may involve helping patients remember to take their medication. It may involve dietary guidance, connections to social support, nudges to undertake physical activity, or other non-drug interventions.  While many of these initiatives have been standard practice for years, they were typically part of a one-size-fits-all approach. Connected Health will allow us to unify these initiatives into a pervasive experience that is tailored to each patient, and that greatly improves their results.

Take the problem of non-adherence mentioned earlier—patients failing to take their medication according to the prescribed schedule. Suppose they’ve filled the prescription but are just forgetting to take it on time. Maybe all they need are well-placed reminders on Post-it notes, or maybe a text message when it’s medication time. Or maybe not. People have an amazing capacity to ignore reminders. What works for some people may totally fail for others. Connected Health identifies different types of patients, finds out what works for them, and tailors their experience accordingly. It deploys different content assets through different channels on different platforms to the different patient types. In doing so, Connected Health can create more seamless patient journeys.  The combination of wearables, cloud-
based analytics, and feedback loops makes for a smarter system. Drawing on masses of fine-grained data, it can segment patients on the basis of which interventions will work for them. It can generate treatment algorithms and clinical decision support. Applying predictive algorithms to real-time monitoring data, it can anticipate events and allow people to get ahead of their condition.