We Need to Start Building Healthcare 5.0 Now

I have seen various attempts to define Healthcare 3.0 and Healthcare 4.0 as the next best thing. These evolutionary steps in Med Tech talk about medicine being patient-centric, based on Big Data and AI and aligning broadly with the Industry 4.0: or, the fourth Industrial Revolution, as we know it. This is my take on where we are and whether these approaches are right.

By Owen Tribe, Digital Partner : CTO : CPTO : Advisor : Strategist at IMIG.

The Pandemic has been both an accelerant and catalyst; Kick-starting the dialogues that will enable technology to deliver healthcare to the masses in a more efficient and cost-effective way. Clearing our backlogs; Empowering patients and clinicians; Opening the door for automated decision-making to improve health outcomes. The pace of adoption is picking up at an exponential rate.

Covid forced healthcare organisations to adopt telemedicine and you would be hard-pressed to find someone to disagree that it’s here to stay. The coming-together of technologists and clinicians is already driving creativity, adaption, usage and consolidation across both these industries. Med Tech is hot stuff, right now.

However, the industrial giants of the coming era, such as Amazon, are already starting to make inroads into this space and I expect the other three dominant digital giants, namely Apple, Microsoft and Google, to follow-suit (or get left behind).

The speed of this consolidation is going to be breathtaking.

The starting pistol for mass aggregation and consolidation has already been fired. I would expect the pace of mergers and acquisitions to accelerate exponentially over the next couple of years as we move towards a change to proactive medicine (rather than the legacy reactive model): it is cheaper to prevent a patient getting ill in the first place than to fix them when they go wrong.

I expect to see a single subscription model like Apple One or Amazon Prime where a family pays a provider for everything digital (Digital Transformation is not about process, it’s about going to the Moon and the end of Government as we know it) including healthcare*. We are already used to the monthly subscription model and I would not be surprised if, in the future, it included hardware as well as software and services -this has been the endgame ideal for decades.

Generally, in the Med Tech industry, we broadly talk about digitally transforming our legacy healthcare services using terms such as APIs, Cloud, Big Data, AI, Interoperability, Machine Learning and Internet of Things as if these are revolutionary new ideas. They aren’t; Healthcare is late to the party.

These are Web 2.0 terms and Industry 4.0 is about a digital revolution. In Why does health data need Web 3.0, I talk about how the proliferation of health data needs new technology rather than being based on a corrupt and now legacy model (it’s worth reading if you haven’t already).

It isn’t that AI, Big Data, Cloud, Machine Learning aren’t relevant but the premise that modern ecosystems will be built using them is just wrong.

The big four (again, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google) all have certain characteristics in common: they all provide verifiable identities to consumers; They all provide trusted environments; They all provide hardware as well as software; They all have infinite pockets and resources; We already use them and are invested in them as providers.

Increasingly, they have our data but Web 3.0 will likely change that. Instead, I expect them to be trusted curators and guardians of health blockchains into which our data will be stored.

If we want to be truly revolutionary, we need to skip Healthcare 3.0 and 4.0 and go directly to 5.0. because patients, the industrial giants and the revolution won’t wait for you.

Med Tech organisations, take note: you should be investing at least half of your efforts in Web 3.0 technologies to stay relevant: You need the right people by your side.

* The public/private healthcare debate is not something I am going to cover, here.

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