5 Key Trends in Connected Health One of the most exciting market opportunities in healthcare today is the near limitless set of innovative solutions that can be created through the integration of the Internet, software, wireless connectivity and other technologies. From personal health management to remote and real-time patient monitoring solutions, a healthcare renaissance is on and with it, a host of new development and commercialization challenges.
Introduction The convergence of Internet, connected technologies and mobile health has created a new dynamic between healthcare providers and their customers. There is a huge growth in the support and use of connected health programs, devices and sensors to help improve health and wellness, and engage patients, providers and payors, while better utilizing healthcare resources. This presents an opportunity for a host of new products and vendors who can support these ecosystems via innovative connected solutions. This can lead to improved benefits for the end customer in the form of improved healthcare, reduced costs, outcome based care and more real-time information related to their health and wellness. The industry is approaching this in two ways. One is to find ways to consult the patient without patient requiring to go to the doctor or a medical professional a la tele healthcare, mobile healthcare, remote healthcare. Second and equally important element is trying to reduce the curative intervention by directing more tools and technologies in preventive healthcare and self-management of medical conditions. With the healthcare industry undergoing a tremendous amount of growth, the next few pages cover the key trends identified by various analyst groups in this industry. Trend #1: Connected Health IDC Health Insights launched a new research advisory service that examines the evolving Connected Health market and provides in-depth coverage of other health services. According to IDC Health Insights, over the next four years connected health services will enable the transformation of healthcare delivery from traditional office-based and hospital settings to the consumer s home or anywhere via the consumer s device. This will be critical to achieving the health reform objectives of reduced healthcare costs and improved patient outcomes. M2M (machine to machine) devices are one of the most critical components of connected health and these devices are expected to grow to 586 million devices globally by 2020, accounting for EUR29 billion in revenues globally. 2
Symphony Services provides a connected health solution to product development companies that ranges from client development to sensor design, network architecture and backend design, connectivity, application development and finally the complete management of the whole solution. Also Symphony understands the underlying aspect of regulatory environment, compliance standards for processes and artifacts such as ISO 13485, 510K documentation, 21 CFR 11, ISO 62304, HL7, HIPPA and other electronics compliance standards such as CE, EMI/ EMC etc. Trend #2: mhealth The mobile health industry is brimming with new health applications, devices and services that are boosting individuals ability to connect better to their health. 40% of consumers surveyed by the Health Research Institute (HRI) said they would pay for remote monitoring devices and a monthly service fee to send data automatically to their doctors. mhealth improves outcomes, reduces cost and recasts physician capacity issues by driving clinical decisions with better information and eliminating as many as 30% of office visits by providers estimates in an HRI survey. HRI estimates the annual consumer remote/ mobile monitoring market to be as high as $43 billion. Symphony s mhealth offerings consist of healthcare domain & regulatory expertise, usability engineering & visualization capabilities, enterprise mobility offering with accelerators, device management services, cloud enablement Services (SaaS), healthcare QA automation and certification on mobile devices and many more. This enables healthcare ISVs and enterprise companies to improve their product pipeline in compliance with FDA norms, reduce their development life cycle and help them be early market leaders, delivering these solutions. Trend #3: Interoperability In a recent Bain & Company survey, hospital CIOs ranked their own hospital s IT interoperability as the most important strategic issue for their organizations. They found it an even more urgent priority than reducing IT operating costs. According to this study, hospital CIOs plan to double their spending on interoperability solutions over the next five years. Having IT systems that communicate well with one another ranks very high as a strategic priority among hospital CIOs surveyed by Bain & Co. The study further confirmed that addressing interoperability gaps becomes not just a top strategic priority to offer patients better healthcare-but also a smart way to manage a hospital s financial health. 3
Symphony services has a comprehensive experience and understanding in the area of healthcare interoperability standards, medical devices connectivity including, experience in: Healthcare interoperability standards like HL7, HL7 web services, CDISC, DICOM, ANSI 4010/5010, EDI etc Healthcare interface engines and hubs like MIRTH M2M device interoperability standards Regulatory and compliance experience associated with HIE and data standards hospital CIOs ranked their own hospital s IT interoperability as the most important strategic issue for their organizations Bain & Co Survey Trend #4: Social Healthcare Healthcare is entering a new era where consumers are becoming motivated by value and opportunities to lower costs and stay healthy. And technology and social media offer unprecedented new ways to engage them. A survey by Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation finds that technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional. The Health 3.0 movement has nurtured dozens of startups with creative concepts to revolutionize health care like: Tools from vertical search and social networks to health content aggregators and wellness tools. The big data analytics movement is creating a new surge to analyze the data available on the social media and come up with new strategies to develop outcome-based preventive care that would eventually save cost and implement effective care models involving all the stakeholders of the care cycle. Three in ten Americans said they would use their cell or smart phone to track and monitor their personal health, and 40 percent would be willing to pay for a remote monitoring device that sends health information directly to their doctor. PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute Survey Symphony Services has extensive experience integrating social media into healthcare solutions and has built consumer healthcare portals that facilitate disease management and include all stakeholders like patient, provider, payor, pharma company/device manufacturers. Symphony has also built big data analytic solutions for its clients that mine all the social media data and provide insights for hidden etiologies, disease patterns, consumer behavior, medication trends and treatment protocols. 4
Trend #5: Moving to the Cloud As cloud computing is getting more pervasive, healthcare organizations are adopting the cloud and virtualizing their health IT departments. There is a move from physical servers to virtual servers and into the cloud. This allows organizations to no longer need to have their own servers, networks, or even data, stored locally, but perform compute and store via the Internet from a vendor s location, thereby freeing up their budget. As Dr. Crounse posted in Microsoft s Health Blog, Health IT Future is in Cloud, the industry is moving to the cloud for 24/7/365 access to information. So, no matter where we go to get our care, our records can be viewed by clinicians. There are also cloud-based Electronic Medical Record Systems. The cloud will enable patients and caregivers access to information that was unavailable just five years ago. Source: Mimecast, Cloud Adoption Survey Results, February 4, 2010 Healthcare applications generate high volumes of PHI data requiring constant access to this data in a secured manner (HIPAA mandates). Cloud and SaaS solutions in a SAS-70 environment provide a secured and scalable payas-you-store and pay-as-you-use environment respectively, resulting in highly secured data access with reduced costs. Symphony Services cloud enablement and SaaS services coupled with the other healthcare regulatory offerings provides a perfect recipe to rapidly developing the above features in a secure and cost effective manner. The Benefits of Symphony Connected Health Solution Symphony collaborates with its clients to implement or expand the use of connected health solutions, which can result in several important benefits: Increase pace of innovation - Deliver new innovations to market faster by reducing the time to market in your development lifecycle by up to 30% via agile methodologies and consistent release processes. This accelerates the return on investment on new product development; Capitalize on new markets Deliver innovative connected health solutions to the market, like Personal Health Management, Patient Monitoring, Social Media, M2M etc., that help deliver improved health and wellness; Enrich user experience and increase customer satisfaction - Improve usability and performance of your product and increase customer acceptance levels and satisfaction by performing early-stage and automated quality checks; Leverage best practices and latest tools - Deliver high quality solutions leading to further savings of 25-30% by leveraging best practices around planning, estimation, metrics collection and process improvement; Increase revenue and profits Accelerate the go-to-market by delivering a cost-optimized fully compliant endto-end solution from a single vendor, increasing the overall revenue in the process. 5
Conclusion As the world becomes more and more connected through the evolution to the Internet of things, Symphony Services is focused on delivering high quality solutions in the connected health space. Symphony offers the full spectrum of new product development capabilities for our clients from sourcing market requirements to hardware design, assembly, manufacturing and delivering a fully tested product. About Symphony Symphony Services is a software innovation company. We help our clients ideate, develop, deploy and manage innovative software and software-enabled products. Our solutions address traditional and new software product engineering challenges created by faster release cadences, the need for mobile cross-platform user experiences and the shift to a cloud delivery model. Symphony s unique Outcome Certainty engagement model enables our clients to accelerate their product experiences while tackling a wide range of new development complexity and cost challenges with guaranteed results. Our global client base includes 8 of the 10 largest software manufacturers, along with leading www.symphonyteleca.com 2012 Symphony Teleca Corporation. All rights reserved. 6