Healthcare Opportunities and Challenges

FountainBlue’s January 17 VIP roundtable was on the topic of ‘Healthcare Opportunities and Challenges’. Thank you also to our gracious host at Roche. Below are notes from the conversation.  

We had an outstanding group of diverse executives, all representing the breadth and depth of healthcare – from medical equipment and medical supplies and devices, to healthcare services and providers, to the biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and miscellaneous scientific and professional services related to the curative, preventive, rehabilitative, and palliative care of patients of every ilk.

Through the variance of perspectives, our healthcare executives agreed the data revolution continues and is impacting healthcare in many ways, even enabling personalized medicine. For example, the sheer volume of knowledge is overwhelming and the accumulation of knowledge continues to escalate. In fact, accumulated medical knowledge took 50 years to double, but today, it takes 73 days.  

What becomes critical then is figuring out what data is relevant to whom for what purpose and how that relevant data will drive better decision-making for patients, practitioners, providers, vendors, care-givers, insurers, etc. 

Below are some opportunities highlighted by our executives:

• Leverage the data to optimize diagnosis, decision-making, and treatment easier, more collaborative, more robust, more dynamic.
• Embrace technological solutions to age-old health challenges.
• Help institutions and providers leverage technology to be more effective and more efficient.
• Provide integrated hardware and software solutions which help patients optimize their own health, manage their own conditions.
• Efficiently provide comprehensive, individualized programs which are scalable and customizable, yet also cost-effective to manage and run.
• Serve the proactive, informed patient/consumer who will increasingly demand more personalized services.
• Offer technology solutions which enabled integrated health and wellness.
• Create solutions which help hospitals integrate legacy data and hardware, while also improving processes and providing more digital functionality.
• Consider opportunities around remote monitoring for the aging population, leveraging mobile devices and sensors.
• Optimize logistics, delivery, fulfillment and retail support for the highly-regulated healthcare market.
• Integrate today’s hot technologies into comprehensive healthcare applications: AI/ML, Edge Computing, IoT, Robotics, Deep Fake, 3D modeling, AR/VR…

A major theme in the discussion is that collaboration across leaders, organizations, nations, and industries is key.

• Corporations continue to make build/buy/partner decisions with start-ups targeting specific niche markets.
• The sharing of data, if managed well to respect privacy and access, can benefit all stakeholders.
• Create platforms which would allow multiple stakeholders to collaborate in the service of patients, in the search for cures.
• Industry leaders and technologists and advocacy groups need to partner with policymakers to improve the evaluation process, to better serve patients.
• Genius ideas can come from anywhere – providing the data and information will help more geniuses step forward.

The bottom line is that no matter where we sit at the table, as a patient, as a technologist, as a provider, we are all in charge of our own health. Empowering all stakeholders with tools, resources and information will help us all make better healthcare choices.

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