Innovation And New Product Development In Healthcare

Health care is of course a topic of great interest and concern globally as the confluence of macro factors have converged to make it one of the most significant concerns facing leaders and citizens in all nations. Over the past year, the healthcare sector experienced dramatic change, with novel business models, unexpected collaborations, and accelerated timelines requiring organizations to rethink how they operate. Many of these shifts are likely to persist. While the COVID-19 pandemic has placed unparalleled demands on modern healthcare systems, the industry’s response has vividly demonstrated its resilience and ability to bring innovations to market quickly.

Why Is Innovation So Crucial In Healthcare?

When we talk about disruptive innovation in healthcare, there are a few ways to define what that means. Healthcare providers have long championed technological innovation as a way to deliver better care, from magnetic resonance imaging or MRI to new surgical procedures.

But, the patient experience was an area more traditionally neglected in healthcare. Telehealth and the rise of consumerism changed the narrative — today, providers succeed when they provide high-quality patient experiences.

The last two years required digital healthcare to scale — the next step for providers is to dig deeper into the patient experience. The modern generation of patients shops for healthcare in a vastly different way from those in the past. Healthcare is now a consumer-centric market, as patients seek care at the quality and price standards that work for them. Changing regulations make it easier for patients to price shop, understand their in or out-of-network options, evaluate a care provider’s reputation and seek alternatives. On the provider side, there is still some work to do — namely developing a more integrated experience that helps all aspects of the clinic run smoothly.

Disruptive innovation in healthcare will shape patient care and experiences, as providers try to keep doctors’ schedules booked and hospitals running efficiently at full capacity. The value of digital healthcare is now firmly planted in the brains of executives.

o??Digital adoption - The healthcare sector has long been a laggard in digital adoption, but the pandemic delivered a massive jolt of urgency to embrace new tools and technologies. Providers rapidly scaled offerings and were seeing 50 to 175 times the number of patients via telehealth a few months into the pandemic compared with what they did before. Providers have also more broadly embraced digital engagement with patients and communities, such as proactively messaging about COVID-19-related protocols. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical and medtech companies have expanded their investments in digitally enabled clinical trials and customer-engagement models.

According to a McKinsey and Company report, in April 2020, overall telehealth utilization for office visits and outpatient care was 78 times higher than in February 2020.

o??Workplace of the future - Many parts of healthcare system require in-person care, but the pandemic has illuminated the extent to which healthcare can be delivered remotely, such as virtual care and remote patient monitoring, and virtual collaboration for professionals in the pharmaceutical and medtech industries. This model supports greater flexibility and has enabled organizations to draw from a more diverse talent pool.

Healthcare leaders are also re-evaluating old workplace norms and introducing new measures, such as offering assistance to help combat videoconferencing fatigue.

Adapting to these shifts along with myriad others will require many healthcare organizations to transform their operations—and their mindsets. Our past experiences have always shown us that prioritizing innovation during crises can help unlock growth in the recovery, provided leaders approach it with commitment and establish key capabilities and processes.

o??Rapid acceleration - From vaccines to new designs of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators, numerous recent examples demonstrate the healthcare sector’s ability to innovate at previously unimagined speeds. In the United States for example, the US Food and Drug Administration deployed a range of measures such as issuing new guidance, establishing new industry engagement models and issuing emergency use authorizations designed to support the COVID-19 response across the range of products it regulates. In several instances, the FDA stipulated or requested that manufacturers gather data derived from the real-world use of products in order to better characterize performance, understand supply-chain vulnerability, and support additional development activity, both throughout and beyond the pandemic.

Let's take a look at some disruptive innovations in healthcare that are set to shape the patient experience

Internet of Things - There are nearly endless use cases for IoT in any industry. Healthcare is no exception, both in terms of patient care and patient experience.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is one area of growing need as healthcare providers evolve and the point of care expands. Any time a healthcare provider can monitor a patient’s health without requiring an office visit, they can add to the revenue stream and make care recommendations with no overhead — often at a cost savings for patients. IoT devices can gather all sorts of valuable patient data and are becoming more sophisticated and ubiquitous.

Wearable health monitoring devices also exist for a variety of different types of patient demographics for routine or emergency use, including pregnant women, elderly patients and children with unique medical needs. Additionally, recreational wearables are increasingly common in households, as they can provide valuable information about the wearer’s vital or fitness statistics.

However, the proliferation of these devices, not to mention the wide variety of environments in which patients will use them, create a significant challenge for healthcare IT departments. Some patients live in areas with slow cloud upload/download speeds; others might live or work in areas with extreme weather conditions, during which the device must continue to work.

IoT is one disruptive innovation in healthcare that will continue to expand, and continue to require a heavy emphasis on testing.

Artificial intelligence - AI has become a disruptive innovation in healthcare that offers tremendous opportunities for better patient care and ROI. AI is playing an increasing role in triage and diagnoses, such as through medial image reading. While humans make the final call on diagnosis and treatment, AI models can gather and process large amounts of image data to offer a second opinion of sorts, which can be especially useful for hard-to-read scans.

While this type of usage is in vogue, AI has ample opportunity to be a disruptive innovation in healthcare logistics and patient experience too.

Consider the patient check-in example. Increasingly, hospitals are rolling out kiosks as a way to sign in and check symptoms for appointments. These kiosks are now becoming much more sophisticated. One purpose of these kiosks was to remove a valuable healthcare worker as a touchpoint for check-in and triage, a largely automatable process, not unlike how quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s deploy kiosks to accept in-store orders. Upskilled healthcare workers can focus on more complex triage management. These kiosks will expand to cover more tasks in the near future, including capabilities like facial recognition and natural language processing. When deployed and tested properly, these solutions can provide a differentiating customer experience.

mHealth - Doctors, administrators and patients all use mobile phones and apps in their daily lives — and it’s time they become a regular part of patient care. Moving forward, mHealth mobile health will prove to be a powerful tool, and a differentiator for patient experience.

Many patients let preventative treatment lapse, or simply go years without scheduling an appointment. These patients risk long-term health consequences that early detection and intervention might catch. While it won’t prevent all illnesses, mHealth apps give providers the opportunity to connect and communicate directly with patients, putting care recommendations right in front of their eyes.

Concluding Thoughts

A societal transformation towards healthier lifestyle choices is needed, together with several other actions: a re-engineering of health systems to put people at the centre, the provision of adequate funding which ensures that money is well spent, and a culture of building partnerships to deliver good outcomes. This also means having the right global health architecture and the support from legislators for the necessary legislation and budgets at the national level, as well as leadership from communities and action across government to ensure the design of health systems that leave no one left behind.

Rapid development and deployment of innovations will continue to be critical in the post-pandemic world. Healthcare has started to embrace the experimental mindset model of releasing test versions where safety permits that are improved based on user feedback. Above all else, disruptive innovation in healthcare experiences depends on a commitment to digital quality and patient wellbeing.