How can we better steer health technology investment to deliver smart intelligent health ecosystems?

The health sciences and wellness industry needs to accelerate to catch up with the 21st century. Measured by speed of progress, impactful technological innovations and the delivery of a winning user experience, health care simply lags behind other sectors. Much of the industry remains in an “analog” state with only pockets of “digitalization.” We urgently need to push beyond this stage to build a “connected” and, ultimately, a truly “smart” system — which I have described before as an Intelligent Health Ecosystem (IHE).

For patients, the IHE would become a personalized and interactive partner supporting health and wellness. Today’s clinicians typically capture only a freeze-frame of a patient’s state of health by running tests at a single point in time. Within the IHE, by contrast, doctors will be able to access continuous patient-specific data over extended periods, giving them a deeper and more historic understanding of each individual’s personal baseline vital signs and relevant data and how these trends are shifting for better or worse. Drawing on this rich, holistic data, care interventions can be personalized and, in doing so, become more impactful. The IHE will become an aid to prevention of illness, and, when treatment is needed, will act as a coach to help patients recover and maintain wellbeing. Care will become more accessible, more predictive and more affordable when delivered by the smart system of tomorrow.

But why should it be the system of tomorrow? What holds back the development of an IHE today?

One answer: under-investment in new technologies. The EY Intelligent Health Ecosystem Innovation Dashboard shows technology investments by health sciences and wellness companies are mostly at pilot stages. Over the past 12 months, the number of pilots has multiplied, yet none have reached the scale of investment and implementation that could make them true drivers of change. Organizations are under-investing, despite the findings of our 2024 EY Health Voices study, which discussed the current situation with senior figures across the industry, that ineffective use of technology and data is the single biggest weakness of the health care system today. The industry recognizes this weakness but fails to act upon it. Why?

The findings from EY Health Voices answer this question: The health ecosystem today lacks interoperability, digital infrastructure, and communication and collaboration between stakeholders. The lack of connectivity presents a serious barrier to the ability of technologies to drive change. Care cannot become connected within an ecosystem of silos and segregation. As it stands, providers, payers, patients, pharma companies and other parties are unable to reach out to each other. Across the health ecosystem, we see only very limited collaboration between each stakeholder group today.

Take data sharing, which is key to making care smarter and more personalized, as one example of the problem. There are some technical and regulatory blocks on data sharing, but today it is increasingly possible to overcome these barriers. However, the traditional lack of data sharing and partnering breeds cultural habits, which in themselves become an obstacle to collaboration. Instead of looking outward to their ecosystem partners, organizations should look inward. As a result, life sciences companies (for example), understandably choose conservative technology investments, aimed at improving their own internal operations. From process automation to digital supply chain visibility, these investments are valuable, but they are not enough to accelerate progress toward the IHE. For real transformation that accelerates meaningful change, stakeholders need to come together.

A framework for agreeing on what is valuable — and investing in it for the future

This will only happen when stakeholders can see the return on investment (ROI) from collaborating, which is made more challenging by the disagreement over what stakeholders see as truly valuable. This disconnect leads to organizations focusing their limited capital on different investment priorities; even within a single stakeholder group we see diverging goals. What is needed is a better and shared definition of value, which can form the basis for a value-based framework the different stakeholders can agree on and leverage to drive better collaboration. ?

The good news from EY Health Voices is health stakeholders do align on some goals: Above all, they agree that better patient-reported outcomes is the primary outcome that health care needs to measure and deliver. Amid the conflict, the voice that all stakeholders most need to hear is that of the patient. The central message that all stakeholders can and should agree on is the importance and need for offering a common goal and a path ahead.

There is more good news when we listen to what patients have been and continue telling us. Last year’s EY Global Consumer Health Survey 2023 was emphatic that patients themselves want their data to be shared, as long as organizations are transparent and retain control over their data’s use. Furthermore, patients themselves are ready for a different, better health care model if other stakeholders can come together to deliver it. The study also finds that the majority of patient-consumer respondents are ready to embrace new technologies, having had a taste in recent years of the benefits these technologies bring. Virtual care models offer patients improved support for managing chronic conditions; tech such as apps and wearables give patients tools for self-awareness, self-care and enable stronger communication links with clinicians. By delivering better integrated health and wellness management, as well as improved access, care education and data transparency, digital technologies can revolutionize and improve the patient’s health experience.

With this shared goal in mind, and with the patient’s voice heard loud and clear, what we need to make the next steps toward a better shared future is the creation of value-based frameworks. These frameworks can guide organizations toward making the right investments to deliver that better future. The frameworks will need to be specific to therapeutic area innovation and focused on value alignment. There will be some compromises, but the mutual benefits that can be delivered through increased collaboration on value-based care will be far more impactful and significant.

Once stakeholders believe in and embrace the potential of the IHE, trusting that partnerships can be mutually reinforcing and valuable, aligning on value and collaborating on investments, we will progress far more quickly from digitized to connected to truly intelligent smart health systems. This must not remain a dream of the future; once stakeholders start making the right technology investments to unlock the power of data, the promise of the IHE will finally be within our grasp. For all stakeholders, and above all, for patients, it is time we made that promise a reality.

?The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.

?

?