We hear a great deal about digital health and home monitoring technologies. How do we best position ourselves to take advantage of this growing area?

Home healthcare, as a category, represents a patient friendly and cost-efficient alternative to institutional care. It is a market that is valued at approximately $250B in 2015 and expected to grow at a high single digit rate in the coming years. In this context, there is a clear role for technology to improve such labor intensive and cost inefficient but highly necessary services. Digital health (also known as mHealth and Connected Health) solutions are playing a larger role in the lives of consumers and in the overall paradigm of care, since their advent dating back nearly two decades. On the surface, technology enabled home healthcare should be thriving in the US, due to the following commonly cited facts: the country’s population is aging and acute illnesses are being transformed into chronic diseases, both leading to a significant growth in the patient population. Additionally, the advent of digital health solutions could help keep remotely monitored patients at home, rather than in costly institutions, leading to significant savings to the overall healthcare system. However, the historic growth of technology enabled home healthcare has remained less than impressive, largely due to the underlying business model associated with these solutions. Some of the obstacles include an array of financial and operational barriers, including the misalignment of incentives between payers and providers, the need to establish a strong clinical value proposition, and finally the need to use consumer friendly solutions that can be used and readily adopted by the mostly elderly patient population.

SI was engaged by a market leading healthcare company for developing a strategy around digital health, that integrates the important considerations listed above, and also factors in internal core competencies and weaknesses and strengths of the company. Through a detailed secondary research, and case study analysis approach, SI surveyed a wide range of digital health technologies that have launched in recent years, and evaluated critical factors to their success and/or failure, within the application domain in which they were deployed. Based on this work, the client company established a new business unit focused on digital health and has since expanded its internal core competencies in this field; subsequently, withSI’s assistance, the client company has in-licensed key enabling intellectual property to bolster its competitive positioning in this field.