Digital Disruption in Healthcare: It’s About Time!

Major market forces are dramatically changing the landscape of an industry that has historically been deliberate and methodical in its adaptation to change. The disruptive dynamics and digital technologies being unleashed into this market have set up an unprecedented environment for creating industry leaders and laggards. Now, more than ever, healthcare companies need to adopt more thoughtful product development and supply chain lifecycle management practices to not only survive but grow and defend market share.

The Industry is Transforming and It’s Happening Fast

What exactly are the macro-trends that are disrupting healthcare’s status quo?

• Technological innovations are increasingly asserting their influence over the market.
• The shift in the United States to a value-based care (VBC) model, in which healthcare cost reimbursements are being driven by the efficacy of treatment.
• The entrance of non-traditional players to the marketplace, digitally native competitors eager to test-drive their expertise in the healthcare domain.

Although the healthcare sector may be moving slowly in its response to the digital disruption, the rewards will be significant for those who respond to this market with speed and agility.

Healthcare Needs to Adopt Consumer Tech’s Pace of Innovation

Safe, effective delivery of therapy and ensuring optimal patient care have long been the primary concerns of the healthcare industry. As a result, for much of its existence, product development and lifecycle management has been driven forward by a conservative and steady pace befitting the fulfillment of these concerns, resulting in product lifecycles stretching out as long as 10-15 years.

But today, increasingly, we are seeing that the reliance upon – and wedding of – technology into the product mix is altering traditional product lifecycle expectations. Healthcare products are behaving more like consumer products. Healthcare franchises are discovering that once their products become technology-dependent, they just can’t quit. This new dynamic is here to stay and needs to be managed moving forward. There is much to be learned from consumer technology, particularly within the automotive and transportation markets.

When buying a car today, people rarely base their purchase decisions solely on a vehicle’s ability to transport them—they’re not just checking under the hood or even kicking tires. What’s top-of-mind is how much cool new technology they’re going to have access to in their new set of wheels. They’re checking out the infotainment, connectivity, automotive imaging and advanced driver assistance systems. Getting the car in a favorite color used to be the deal-closer. Now it’s the question, “Does it come with CarPlay?” 

Consumers enter the automotive market for the same basic reason that spurred the popularity of the Model T Ford – to get into something that will take them from point A to point B. But along the way in their collective buyer’s journey, they’ve become delighted by increasing innovations, ones which continually improve upon the delivery of that basic function. 

In healthcare, the end-goal has always been to protect the patient and help improve patient outcomes. This has, historically speaking, anchored therapy as the primary driver of ongoing product iterations, with patient choice taking a back seat. But now, with the dramatic expansion in digital health platforms and other innovative technologies, the patient is increasingly having a voice in how that therapy is delivered.

For instance, in the diabetes domain, as the market has shifted to fuller adoption of interoperability standards, patients are increasingly being placed at the center of a highly individualized custom diabetes product ecosystem. No longer locked into a one-brand system, what’s to keep the consumer from mixing and matching, especially when presented with choices between older generation medical devices or ones with fresh, elegant and intuitive interfaces featuring the latest connected technology and analytics?

Today, what the market is telling us is that companies need to adopt more agile product management strategies. They need to iterate every two to three years, not once a decade, or risk losing market share. On top of that, they need to do this in a regulated market with a momentum that is increasingly towards a value-based model.

According to a Jabil survey on connected health technology trends, 71 percent of participants said that their healthcare product development and launch cycles are longer than 18 months, with 44 percent indicating they face timelines longer than 24 months.

In many ways, this lag in medical device production cycles is understandable. Data management and privacy issues certainly play a role in the hesitancy, but more impactful is the concern that process deficiencies may have life or death consequences. Over time, this has created an industry culture with an inherent cautious and careful DNA that can too easily bleed over into being so tradition-bound that virtuous skepticism becomes unhealthy, collaring productive dialogue and adoptions of positive change. But there’s so much digital innovation can bring to healthcare.

Meanwhile, consumer technology and automotive and transportation franchises have navigated accelerating product cycles brilliantly. Embracing modular design has allowed them to keep pace at the speed of innovation, which in turn has helped mitigate the risk of potential supply chain disruptions. Modular design creates a virtuous circle of feedback and revision, enabling the most traction for products in the market.

We are eager to share what has been made so apparent via pan-Jabil observations of these industries: those companies that work consistently and deliberately to inject adaptability, speed and modularity into their cultures are the winners in their markets.