Bridging the Digital Divide

Several weeks ago, Philips announced it was acquiring US population health software vendor Wellcentive, Inc. As someone who has had a long, beneficial relationship with Wellcentive, I was happy for my many professional colleagues and friends that have worked so hard to achieve such a great outcome.

On a broader scale, this deal, I believe, is about things “getting real” in the health status business, and it represents another step in the necessary connection between physical and digital health. It also represents the importance of addressing the dual-goals of optimizing individual wellbeing at the point-of-care, while focusing on managing and improving health status at a population level. The Wellcentive deal, and other signals, tell me that the health care business is starting to industrialize – to better leverage technology, to standardize approaches, to automate to drive labor productivity, to better align inputs with required outputs and to perform under the weight of new market rigor. The games are over; we’re playing for real.

So much of the promise of industrialization is tied to how to build a better ecosystem, a better mousetrap in communities all across the U.S. to focus on how to really deliver value. We are starting to see real progress leveraging the industrial internet. All of us have benefited for years now from the explosiveness of the consumer internet, and we are just now starting to understand the massive benefits of connecting all modalities – legacy and new, diagnostic and therapeutic, preventive and interventional – with a broad navigation, control and communication system that can coordinate and choreograph heretofore disconnected tools. More and more of the gadgets, tools and appliances we use every day are built “smart;” they connect to the internet and allow humans to accomplish greater and greater efficiencies. And this phenomenon will only grow. GE estimates that the “Internet of Things” (IoT) economy is expected to top $60T by 2030 or so with over 50B devices and assets connected to the internet by 2020. Combining IT with OT (operating or physical technology) like Philips is doing in its combination with Wellcentive will be a game changer – connecting a lot of old economy tools through the new economy pipeline.  At Continuum, we refer to this as developing service at the “top of the Toolkit”, utilizing the collection of available solutions in a configuration that maximizes value.

The opportunities in health care for this disruption are endless. Imagine planning to serve a population under care and having a much bigger armamentarium – to not only include traditional professionals, services, drugs, therapeutics and diagnostics, but to leverage those in a way to allow for a much higher order of efficiency in coordinating care, both at the individual level and the population level. It will allow us to make the most of the tools we have, including pursuing legacy investments. It’s the new green movement in health – more cost effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, accuracy and less waste, hassle and harm. Let’s get real.