Digital Transformation and Disruption of the Health Care Sector: Internet-Based Observational Study

Abstract

BackgroundDigital innovation, introduced across many industries, is a strong force of transformation. Some industries have seen faster transformation, whereas the health care sector only recently came into focus. A context where digital corporations move into health care, payers strive to keep rising costs at bay, and longer-living patients desire continuously improved quality of care points to a digital and value-based transformation with drastic implications for the health care sector.ObjectiveWe tried to operationalize the discussion within the health care sector around digital and disruptive innovation to identify what type of technological enablers, business models, and value networks seem to be emerging from different groups of innovators with respect to their digital transformational efforts.MethodsFrom the Forbes 2000 and CBinsights databases, we identified 100 leading technology, life science, and start-up companies active in the health care sector. Further analysis identified projects from these companies within a digital context that were subsequently evaluated using the following criteria: delivery of patient value, presence of a comprehensive and distinctive underlying business model, solutions provided, and customer needs addressed.ResultsOur methodological approach recorded more than 400 projects and collaborations. We identified patterns that show established corporations rely more on incremental innovation that supports their current business models, while start-ups engage their flexibility to explore new market segments with notable transformations of established business models. Thereby, start-ups offer higher promises of disruptive innovation. Additionally, start-ups offer more diversified value propositions addressing broader areas of the health care sector.ConclusionsDigital transformation is an opportunity to accelerate health care performance by lowering cost and improving quality of care. At an economic scale, business models can be strengthened and disruptive innovation models enabled. Corporations should look for collaborations with start-up companies to keep investment costs at bay and off the balance sheet. At the same time, the regulatory knowledge of established corporations might help start-ups to kick off digital disruption in the health care sector.

Identifying the Roles of Healthcare Leaders in HIT Implementation: A Scoping Review of the Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence

“…A growing number of HITs have great potential for improving the quality, safety, patient-centredness and cost-effectiveness of care [3,4]. However, digitalisation is slower and more complicated in healthcare settings compared to other fields of business [5][6][7]. In addition, despite major investments [7], HIT implementation tends to fail more often in healthcare settings [6,8,9].…”

How the COVID-19 pandemic is favoring the adoption of digital technologies in healthcare: a rapid literature review

“…The definition of each healthcare need is reported in Table 1. We added "surveillance" as an additional healthcare need, [5] given the importance of early identification and confinement of COVID-19 patients, and a category "other" to include any further category not considered.…”

“…Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was expected that digital transformation in health care would have been as disruptive as that seen in other industries. However, as stated by Hermann et al, [5] "despite new technologies being constantly introduced, this change had yet to materialize". [6] It appears that now the spread of COVID-19 has finally provided an ineludible sound reason to fully embrace the digital transformation.…”

Healthcare 4.0: A review of frontiers in digital health

“…Inspired by the fourth paradigm-data-intensive scientific discovery (Hey, Tansley, Tolle, 2009), Healthcare 4.0 is a collective term for datadriven digital health technologies such as smart health, mHealth (mobile health), wireless health, eHealth, online health, medical IT, telehealth/telemedicine, digital medicine, health informatics, pervasive health, and health information system. It describes the digital frontiers and disruptive innovation in the health care sector that is driving new business models and value networks (Herrmann et al, 2018). Advancements and adoptions of Healthcare 4.0 are occurring across many developed countries in the world with the digital health market expected to grow to $223.7 billion by 2023 (Prescient, & Strategic Intelligence, Sept, 2018).…”