Healthtech innovators; What are our customers telling us?

“Digital health is the best thing in healthcare since penicillin.”?

The above is a profound statement as healthcare is undergoing unprecedented change right before our eyes, which can only be likened to penicillin’s discovery a century ago. If one were to broaden their mind just enough, it would be clear that this wave will leave no part of the global pharmaceutical and healthcare space untouched.

One of the most significant changes emerging from this wave is “Consumer behaviour” and the rise of self-care technologies, providing practical, caring services in someone’s place of choice [see a piece on e-health and healthcare service consumption from a couple of years ago].?

Let’s explore this for a moment.?

Mayo Clinic recently launched its Advanced Care at Home program, which leverages connected medical devices and a software platform to deliver complex care to patients from their homes. Fantastic testimonies by the Preeclampsia Foundation of pregnant mothers at risk of Preeclampsia tracking their blood at home and catching the danger signs long before a clinic visit are just a few of the use cases. In each of these use cases, the consumer found the specific problem first and then invited the healthcare professional to take action.

For as long as one can remember, our healthcare information, from physiological variables to health and wellness data, was only collected and organized during a visit to our experts (healthcare professionals). They thus retained the sole rights and responsibility of eliciting, recording and tracking all this vital information about the healthcare consumer. Healthcare professionals rely on this pertinent corpus of information to decide how to treat an ailing patient; thus, the health record is the bane of clinical intervention and overall well-being.

Fast-forward to 2020, with 441.5m people owning a wearable, according to Statistica, we are now beginning to generate far more healthcare data passively and in the process of natural behaviour than can ever be dreamt of by the family physician, for instance. Like all things new, there are questions about all this data’s quality and usability, especially given that traditional institutions still mostly reimburse for illness treatment, not illness prevention.

How does all of this impact consumer behaviour, one may ask? Well, it does massively!?

The average individual with no prior medical education is more aware of their health status than ever. We carry an array of connected early warning systems that continuously measure, collect, store, and make a beautiful story of our health status. All while we go about our regular lives.

Consumers are more likely to make lifestyle changes and data-guided decisions about their health and well-being without visiting a doctor’s office. These same consumers have ever-increasing access to various clinical and wellness telehealth providers to advise or intervene on the fly without any need for physical interaction. And yes, consumers are ever-increasingly choosing to interact this way.

“Know your customer;” two decades ago, a bank to the average consumer meant a building, queues, people, etc., “sounds familiar?” Today to the average consumer, a bank is a collection of apps and web portals, all driven by consumer-centricity, competition and Fintech innovation. The consumer can carry out all the transactions they’ll ever need in their lifetime from their place of most convenience, thanks to Fintech.

In comes, Healthtech, driven by the same consumer-centricity, innovation, proliferation of Apps and sensors and competition; the face of healthcare is changing at breathtaking speed, more so since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Consumer-centricity is once more driving this; Consumers are changing their health-seeking behaviour, forcing technology and service providers to ever-new frontiers of innovation.?

Hence, healthcare innovators must double down on products that help the non-medically trained consumer passively collect and intuitively present well-being data and provide them with the actionable insights they need to take ownership of their health.