A new era of transition and maturity in connected health

Connected health is in the midst of a 15 to 18 year maturity transformation journey, and recognizing where we are in that journey is critically important to understanding what is at stake for our current efforts and where we need to effectively plan for future growth.

About a third of the way through this journey, most companies have ongoing connected health efforts developing digital solutions and digital therapeutics to bring to market, but are beginning to get questions from a C-suite that is increasingly more interested in where the return has been for these products and what value additional funding request will bring.

Past connected health market failures and the visibility into digital scale that COVID has provided us, are driving leaders to be more cost focused and push for greater efficiency. Insisting on better definition of return, and economies of scale to support dozens of connected health offerings for what is being paid now for development of one or two.

The US Affordable Care Act (ACA) created the driver for the explosive growth in the digital health space some years ago, by establishing health outcomes as a measure of success and reimbursement. In doing so, it sparked a jump from the old standalone app for health approach, into connected systems and solutions that while app based, require more dedicated ecosystems and structures to support the compliant and regulated nature of delivery of these offerings. That has given rise to a rush of new therapy area/condition-specific platforms and technologies that have helped advance the current efforts, but that will likely pose limits to growth over time.

It’s going to be critical for companies to think about how do we transition from the legacy drug world of “let’s take this antigen molecule or compound and see if it works for the patients” into a digital informed model where, while we absolutely address the needs of the patient, we do so with stricter financial forecasts for products, and clear line of sight into the revenue expectations that will serve as the rationale for growth moving forward.

But as we near the end of this first phase of the industry’s journey, we are now facing a new era of transition and maturity in connected health. One that will be driven by an increased focus on revenue, maturity of, and scale. Recognizing your organization’s place in this journey will allow you to properly prepare and accelerate your efforts as we leave the experimentation and innovation phase and enter a phase built around establishing true business value for connected health in life sciences and pharma.

At Capgemini, we have identified five key challenge areas of growth that Life Science companies need to address in order to begin this transformation – Connected health portfolio strategy, operations integration, product valuation, lifecycle development, and ability to scale.

We believe that these are the pivotal issues that your teams will face over the next five years and have organized our Connected Health offering to focus specifically on addressing these challenges. If you would like to learn more, please connect with us directly. We look forward to discussing our expertise and approach in depth with each of you.