Maximising Value for Patients: A Transformative Opportunity
The digital front door is leading to a new era in healthcare. We predict that by 2023, 65% of patients worldwide will have accessed care through a digital front door. As European healthcare providers aspire to increase care access, enhance patient engagement and experience, and maximise value delivered to healthcare consumers, they are accelerating the adoption of digital health technologies at every patient touchpoint. Digitally enabled services are proliferating across the entire patient journey, spanning patient education, screening and diagnostics, virtual consultations, remote monitoring, digital therapeutics, and healthy lifestyle support.
Evidence accumulated since the start of the pandemic reveals patients’ high satisfaction with virtual encounters across a range of diseases. In fact, both providers and patients show a strong preference for continued usage of digitally enabled services to complement regular services, even after the pandemic ends:
- For patients, this is largely about enabling convenient and timely access to health services and facilitating meaningful relationships with healthcare providers. The digital front door offers a gateway to digital-first health experiences for the patients of the new digital era.
- For healthcare providers, this is a transformative opportunity in the new realm of value-based healthcare to maximise the value created for patients. Digital health technologies allow healthcare providers to capture the relationship with patients better, address their needs more comprehensively anytime and anywhere, and provide more consumer-friendly personalised services to take patients’ experience to the next level.
Accessing Care Through a Digital Front Door
The digital front door has emerged as a critical pathway for improving patient access to care during the pandemic. Telehealth and virtual care services became crucial means of supporting the continuity of essential healthcare services, both to COVID-19 patients and in non-COVID-19 care, while protecting patients, ensuring staff safety, and containing infection spread.
Recognising the potential, European healthcare organisations are striving to scale up digitally enabled healthcare services beyond emergency use, and this trend will persist. Nearly all European countries have rushed to adopt policies, clarify legislative frameworks, and define reimbursement models to promote telemedicine and digital health services. This has fuelled unprecedented investments in digital health technologies. IDC’s surveys show that over 90% of European healthcare providers are investing in telehealth and virtual care technologies, remote patient monitoring systems, and patient apps. Digital therapies are growing in traction. IDC predicts that by 2025, the global market for prescription digital therapeutics will more than triple, led by mental health and chronic conditions.
The New Vision for a Patient-Centric Digital Innovation Strategy
European healthcare organisations have proceeded rapidly with digital health initiatives and innovation. But how to mainstream and scale these initiatives to drive sustainability and maximise benefits for patients? European healthcare providers should embrace a new vision for digital innovation built around patient-centric ecosystems. They should:
- Build digitally enabled patient-centric ecosystems and intelligently engage in trust relationships with all relevant internal and external stakeholders for the benefit of patients.
- Leverage how the various stakeholders influence, participate in, and decide on planning, funding, and implementing digital innovation strategies and investment plans.
- Orchestrate multidisciplinary teams that bring together internal and external professionals and adopt more agile approaches to innovation that rely on co-design between business and IT.
This transformation calls for a new digital platform designed to serve patients and health professionals intelligently and support secure engagement with the entire ecosystem of stakeholders to accelerate the personalisation and integration of care and bring the “patient of one” vision to life, while supporting the efficiency and robustness of individual organisations.
At the IDC European Healthcare Executive Digital Summit 2022, we will discuss how more agile approaches to innovation relying on closer collaboration between organisations, patients, and clinical and IT stakeholders will influence patient experiences. We will address the following questions:
- How can healthcare organisations reimagine patient experiences through technology such as telemedicine, digital assistants, and apps?
- How can virtual health be made to work at scale?
- How can we maximise the value of digital innovation for patients?
- What is the new vision for digital innovation strategies and patient-intelligent digital platforms in healthcare?
- What role should my organisation play in new healthcare ecosystems?
Join us and the top European healthcare leaders in discussing these and many other hot topics at the IDC European Healthcare Executive Digital Summit 2022 on May 18, 2022. Stay tuned!
For further information on how to register for the Summit, please contact Barbara Cambieri or Charlotte Thygesen Poulsen.
To learn more about our upcoming research agenda, please contact Silvia Piai, Adriana Allocato, or Nino Giguashvili.