Five for Five: ConvergeHEALTH @ Five Years Old

Five years ago this month we launched ConvergeHEALTH recognizing that the shift to value based, personalized healthcare was going to have a profound and transformational impact on the industry enabled by advances in science, the digitization of health, and insights from the resulting “real world” data. Our goal was to team with leading healthcare institutions, tech companies, life sciences innovators, and patient advocacy groups to create new platforms and solutions that would support this transformation for the benefit of patients. 

Its been an incredible journey and we have had the privilege to work with so many talented individuals and organizations along the way, all with the goal of applying technology to benefit patients and society. As we look forward to the next five years, I wanted to share five observations that we believe will continue to drive healthcare towards a more value based, personalized paradigm.

1.      The patient is finally at the center.  With the adoption of FHIR standards and API based approaches to health information exchange, we are quickly moving towards a paradigm shift where the patient truly controls their health information in a convenient and secure way. The patient thus becomes the data aggregation point for not just their clinical data but all of their data. This powerful shift will empower patients to share this data with parties they trust, and enable an ecosystem of innovators to create connected devices, apps, and other services to better support patients on their entire care journey. It will also encourage every party in the healthcare ecosystem to rethink how they engage and support patients – from clinical trials to reimbursement to care delivery. The result should ultimately be a much better experience and outcomes for patients.

2.      Value based everything is the new normal.  Five years ago, the industry was just beginning to experiment with value based approaches to reimbursement, however the information systems and analytics platforms at the time were not in place to truly support this shift.  Despite challenges and hard lessons learned, the industry continues to move in this direction and the type and variety of value based arrangements is accelerating. For example, increasingly pharma and payers are adopting value based contracting arrangements, which will be essential to the healthcare system adopting truly personalized therapies (see next point). The drive to value has changed the way care is provisioned in the health care provider setting and the rise of personal financial responsibility in the US market has driven patient as a consumer behavior. These trends will continue supported by new digital engagement platforms to drive and measure outcomes.

3.      Personalized medicine is about to be mainstream. The amazing scientific progress we have made understanding the underlying mechanisms of health and disease is quickly being translated into healthcare practice. This is most obvious in oncology where new cellular therapies are making their way to the clinic but will impact other diseases as well. While exciting, these new therapies also create many challenges from clinical trial design to a need for a personalized supply chain to questions about how these innovative therapies will be financed. This will require industry incumbents to think and rethink their R&D enterprises, supply chains, patient support organizations and partnership models.

4.      The age of digital health and digital therapeutics. Leaders are defining their digital strategies to act as an enabler, accelerator and innovator of capabilities and initiatives that deliver better outcomes. User experience and design efforts will meet the patient and physician with what they need at the right time in the patient journey, and support new models such as care at home. Creating meaningful digital experiences across all engagement channels will inspire and empower patients to take an active role in their care. In addition, we are seeing increasing evidence that digital engagement platforms can actually improve quality of life and in many cases outcomes for patients. These digital therapeutics will likely revolutionize many disease areas, and in many cases allow better care to be delivered in lower cost settings like the home. 

5.      Evidence is king as R&D goes digital. The traditional drug development model is facing headwinds as evidenced in our annual R&D productivity study where projected returns on investment in R&D are at the lowest levels since we started the study in 2010. New digital health platforms promise to address some of the productivity challenges with clinical development, however real structural and transformative change will come from the use of real world evidence across the entire evidence lifecycle. Our annual real world evidence benchmarking survey of major biopharmaceutical companies shows an acceleration in the breadth and depth of use of real world evidence. RWE is increasingly being used to not only demonstrate the value of therapeutic products but increasingly to address regulatory requirements, drive drug development, support outcomes-based contracts, and reduce products’ time to market. In the next five years, it is likely that we will also see an increase in the  use if AI/ML applied to the sea of existing and new real world data being generated by wearables and other digital health technologies.

It's been an exciting first five years supporting our clients on the journey to value based, personalized healthcare. As I look to the future, I am even more excited and optimistic about what lies ahead as we are truly at the beginning of the digital and data driven transformation of healthcare.

#digitalhealth #RWE #precisionmedicine #BigData #ConvergeHEALTH #Deloitte