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Hitachi

Social Innovation

Social Innovation Addresses Quality, Access & Cost in Healthcare

    Whitepaper shows how Social Innovation business can revolutionise Healthcare globally, with annual opportunities totalling $985 Billion by 2020

    The global Healthcare challenge today is profound: how can we deliver high quality care to every patient globally in a sustainably affordable way? The two key ways to answer this question lie in understanding the Mega Trends driving innovation and change in the Healthcare space, and then exploring how new technologies, exploding volumes of data, and power patients will drive much needed innovation, new business models and novel care delivery platforms, as together we address the threefold challenge facing the global Healthcare industry: Quality, Access and Cost.

    In our Social Innovation in Healthcare Whitepaper we discuss how the future of Healthcare is about leveraging the convergence of Mega Trends and new technologies. There are four key Mega Trends driving the transformation of Healthcare globally: Connectivity & Convergence, New Business Models, Innovating to Zero, and Social Trends. Frost & Sullivan believes there will be at least 80 Billion connected devices globally by 2020, which will empower connected health platforms delivering care to patients from birth to end of life, and from the home to the hospital and everywhere in between.

    New business models driving the future of Healthcare will include the perceivable shift in customers from payers and providers to patients and consumers. The Healthcare value proposition will move beyond products and services to social benefits that enable people and companies to create better societies.

    Innovating to zero is an exciting new way of thinking driven by ultimate societal values, such as innovating obesity rates to zero, determining how to bring hospital borne infections to zero, and unleashing new technologies to bring medication error rates in hospitals down to zero. Finally, Social trends will also transform Healthcare, including more out of pocket patient spending in the growing middle classes, and illustrating the power of women, who make 85% of Healthcare appointments and drive key family decisions.

    "The global Healthcare market is undergoing major transformation with exciting developments in personalization, digitisation, wellness and patient engagement"

    Social Innovation integrates all these trends and technologies to drive the most notable conclusion of our research: that Social Innovation opportunities exist at a society level, system level, down to the individual patient level. At the society level, Social Innovation has the potential to create value and lower Healthcare costs across the entire industry. The Healthcare industry historically has operated in distinct silos, but is now being forced to integrate, thus creating new types of partnerships and collaborations.

    These societal impacts can drive much needed change in developing economies, where over 70% of Healthcare funds are spent on people with chronic conditions. At the system level, a variety of voluminous data is generated, often from sources that are not interconnected. With the growing population and increasing digitisation of Healthcare documents, data is increasing at an exponential rate. Due to limited analytics, much of this information rich data lies latent or is underleveraged.

    At the individual patient level, the future focus within Healthcare will be on the power patient and this is where positive disruption and change is happening in the industry. Power patients are far more informed today, so companies operating in the Healthcare space need to reconsider how customers are thinking, as patients are no longer going to be passive participants in the decision making process. Social networking platforms are playing a key role in patient information, creating opportunities to drive patient engagement.

    In considering the monetary and societal benefits that can be derived from Social Innovation Business in Healthcare, Frost & Sullivan believes there is a $985 Billion value at stake, across five key sectors:

    Five key value sectors

    In conclusion, with Healthcare converging with advanced IT solutions, companies focusing on Social Innovation are poised to benefit society, systems and patients by driving Social Innovation across the care cycle.