By Subhro Mallik, SVP and head of life sciences business unit, Infosys
One in five Americans suffers from chronic pain. Apart from disrupting lives, chronic pain costs the U.S. about $300 billion in productivity every year. Treatment usually involves different types of interventions, such as medication, exercise therapy, cognitive behavioral treatment etc., and the participation of both patients and their healthcare providers. Unfortunately, a highly inadequate pain management infrastructure, which has fewer than 6,000 physicians for treating 50 million patients, is unable to give patients the one-on-one attention they need.
Because they are not supervised, many patients fail to keep up with the prescribed exercise regimen, which happens to be all-important for rehabilitating chronic pain. But now, there is a real possibility for care givers to use digital interventions to remotely monitor and engage with patients to improve compliance as well as treatment outcomes.
Several digital solutions, including mobile apps, sensors, digital medical devices, fitness trackers and wearables, play a role in chronic pain therapy. What’s more, they can be applied across lines of treatment to achieve different purposes – from improving medication adherence to enabling telerehabilitation. A major benefit of digital intervention is that it allows providers to design personalized treatment plans in collaboration with patients, which has been linked to improvement in self-care. Last but not least, these tools help pain management physicians and care givers stay connected to their patients. Here are some scenarios:
Connect with patients to motivate and engage
Providers can deploy a digital platform to gather data from patients’ mobile apps, fitness trackers, and devices to track exercise performance; this insight tells them if they need to personally intervene with feedback or a revised program. The platform itself can also act as a virtual coach, gamifying the exercise routine, supervising patients and motivating them to do better.
Studies show that better engagement makes a significant impact on treatment outcomes. When patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal pain were given a combination of education, sensor-guided exercise therapy, and one-on-one remote health coaching over a twelve-week-long program, they displayed high engagement and also reported reduction in pain.
Despite ending 2018 with a slow Q4, the outlook for technology services in healthcare remains strong, with opportunities in the provider space, robust M&A activity, newly introduced U.S. operations by India heritage firms, and more. The WITCH Report is a comprehensive review of the financial and market performance of global technology firms in healthcare and transaction insight of the sector’s biggest consulting firms.
Damo Consulting announces the annual review of major global technology consulting firms in healthcare. Titled “The WITCH Report” the report includes a comprehensive review of the financial and market performance of 11 global technology consulting firms in healthcare. The report provides a detailed review of market performance metrics, insights and dealings of major global technology firms, including Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant Technology Solutions and HCL (WITCH).
Aspects covered in the WITCH Report include financial performance, mergers and acquisitions, customer wins, strategic partnerships, new product initiatives and leadership announcements.
“Our annual review of 11 publicly held global technology consulting firms indicates a soft Q4 in 2018, with HLS business growth dropping below overall company growth. One firm continues to be an exception, growing at an impressive 18.56 percent on a YoY basis,” said Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO of Damo Consulting and author of The Big Unlock: Harnessing Data and Growing Digital Businesses in a Value-Based Era.
“The HLS business of all companies covered in this report contains a mixture of offerings, from infrastructure and applications services to business process services and in a couple of cases, IP and platform-based services. While the provider segment has long been a challenge for global IT consulting firms for a variety of reasons, we believe there are emerging opportunities in the provider space from digital transformation initiatives and cost reduction pressures, leading to IT operations outsourcing.”
The WITCH Report also provides additional insight on each featured company’s growth strategy. M & A activity continues to be robust. DXC, Cognizant and HCL have been the most active in the space. Many India-heritage firms have also set up operations centers and innovation hubs across the U.S. to be closer to customers with local talent and the need to tap into scarce skills such as design thinking which are important for digital transformation programs.
“The demand outlook for healthcare remains strong and broad-based. Most firms in this report are deriving their revenues currently from the payer and pharma segments, leaving a huge untapped opportunity in the provider space. As providers start to embrace outsourcing and invest more in digital transformation, global IT consulting firms will see a significant growth opportunity,” says Paddy Padmanabhan.
According the results of a recent survey by Infosys, consumers worldwide overwhelmingly will share personal information to get better service from their doctor; however, they are very discerning about how they share.
For example, Americans, Europeans and Australians feel comfortable sharing data with doctors (90 percent), banks (76 percent) and retailers (70 percent); however, the research shows contrasting nuances.
Consumers won’t readily share personal medical history with doctors. The study shows consumers understand the benefits of sharing data but remain cautious of data mining (especially in Europe): 39 percent globally describe data mining as invasive while also saying it is helpful (35 percent), convenient (32 percent) and time saving (33 percent).
