Rx for Bending the Healthcare Cost Curve: Connected Health

Healthcare costs are spiraling out of control, and outcomes of our healthcare efforts are yielding lower results and worse mortality rates those seen in other countries that spend considerably less.  Whether you are a patient, a provider, a payor, or any one of the many other entities involved in providing technologies and services to support healthcare, figuring out what has to change and what role you should play in affecting needed change is an enormous challenge.

To meet this challenge, healthcare of tomorrow will have to be different.

Healthcare of tomorrow will need to be accessed and delivered differently, administered and paid for differently, and driven or enabled by new kinds of services and technologies, many of which will come from companies that, up until now, have not had  or been viewed as having a role in healthcare.

While none of us can know today what our healthcare system will look like tomorrow, one thing is certain:  as the system evolves, all who participate in it – from healthcare providers, to technology firms, communications companies, and payors – will need to take on new roles and responsibilities as they look for and find new ways to create and deliver value.   And none in this space will be able to do so alone.  All players will have to collaborate more and interoperate in new ways if we are to end up with a system that simultaneously produces better outcomes while also significantly driving down the costs of healthcare.

This is why we believe connected health services will be central to meeting our healthcare challenge.

Sometimes called telehealth and encompassing areas such as mHealth and telemedicine, connected health is “the connection of healthcare providers, patients, and payers, using network, devices, applications, and data, for the delivery and payment of health‐related services, irrespective of location.”

We believe connected health services can and will contribute significantly to improving healthcare outcomes while simultaneously enabling us to reduce the costs associated with delivering and receiving healthcare services.

This is why we are in active discussions with technology and service companies that operate in and around connected health to understand and help them understand how they will create and contribute value within the system and make money in the process. We are also actively developing a vertical specialization focused the convergence of those services areas and technologies required to deliver connected health services and solutions.

To be successful, companies that do business in connected health will have to answer three critical questions:  Who will make money …and from whom?  When will revenues and returns be possible?   And for creating what kind of value?

In healthcare, ‘who will pay for this?’ is one of the most fundamental burning questions that need to be answered.  But all too often the answer to this question is anything but straightforward.  The only way to answer this question properly is to think systemically – about where a company fits, how it creates value, and about who could and should pay for that value creation.

Answering these kinds of burning questions requires innovative thinking about strategy.  Perhaps nowhere else will it be more important than in healthcare for companies to recognize that survival will require more than the ability to innovate new technologies or services.  To survive and thrive in the healthcare market of tomorrow, companies will also have to innovate new business models, new relationship strategies, and without question, new revenue strategies.  

Because of this, figuring out how to sustainably generate revenues in this complex and highly competitive space is going to be a big challenge for some time to come.   And as laws, market conditions, and the speed of technological change impact how healthcare gets delivered and consumed, this challenge is only going to increase.

One thing we know:  in complexity lies opportunity. The Healthcare industry in the United States is, hands down, the most complex in the world.  This is why at TGG our main objective is simple:  to help our clients better understand the complexities they face so that they can figure out how best to contribute solutions that matter and make money in the process.

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