Actualités
23/09/2009
Is it too late, or too early?
eHealth
“The major question on eHealth is a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’”, says Steven Andlauer, “assuming that state-of-the-art implementations can drive operational and financial efficiency”.
Key findings
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• The market is still in its infancy and will take two more years to attain serious growth. Issues of regulation, language, investment and training need to be resolved first.
• IT systems in hospitals and for physicians will most probably be the first to grow, quickly followed by home monitoring solutions.
• Healthcare systems differ greatly from country to country, with a multitude of stakeholders in each: insurances, physicians, nurses, the pharmaceutical sector, regulator, schools of medicine and more. Only country-by-country strategies will work.
• Consolidation of the market is likely; the eHealth market is scattered at present, with a few, leading Health IT firms (mainly US-based) and many SMEs.
• The telecom industry, and in particular network operators, have potential business cases in the eHealth market. For these, key assets are secure connectivity and sales channels.
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IDATE has segmented eHealth into three relevant markets, whilst acknowledging that some large companies are active in more than one of these segments:
• Healthcare IT systems
• Home Healthcare
• Transactional services, supporting the two previous segments.
Of those operating in these three segments, IDATE has identified the following five main types of players:
• Health solution developers
• Medical-grade hardware vendors
• Telecom operators
• IT giants
• Web giants.
This market has two characteristics typical of an early market with intense competition: it is very fragmented, and no player has yet reached a global scale on its own. In consequence, companies rely heavily on partnerships to deliver globally across the value chain: whilst some of the Health IT heavyweights offer a large set of solutions all packaged by themselves (including datacentres, outsourcing and patient portals) in most cases partnership deals are struck so that specialists in each fields handle part of the solution.
This fragmentation is likely the result of the complexity of the eHealth market mentioned above: learning how to address a market, developing ad hoc products, can be a matter of years and is not totally replicable to another geography and/or product. Moreover, with medicine being an art in constant evolution, its tools change, its cures evolve and systems must be adapted accordingly. This leaves little headroom for specialised players to focus on other matters than simply keeping their products up to date. Large generalist IT players, on the contrary, are well-positioned to bring this industry to the next level, focusing on integration and maintenance rather than on product development.
The perspective of telecom operators
From the perspective of the telecom industry, eHealth can be considered a growth driver, either by providing direct services to hospitals and patients including portals, devices and eHealth 3G data plans or through indirect services to eHealth solution vendors such as connectivity and authentication APIs and billing. Practically, the prime elements that telecoms can bring to this industry include sensors and communicating modules integrated within mobile handsets, ad hoc secured connectivity services and end-user training capacity.
However, there are also factors which may hinder telecoms entry in this market:
• Reluctance of end-users, including physicians, to embrace new technologies
• Medical data security hurdles: ethical and legal requirements
• Potential health hazards from wireless communication technology
• Management of a number of partnerships for products and/or specific areas.
Market potential: The addressable market for operators
The market of connected healthcare is still at a very early stage. However, caution is called for with regard to how fast it will evolve, due to the intrinsic barriers in the healthcare industry, which is thoroughly regulated and generally operates under difficult financial conditions.
The addressable market for operators is by no means limited to just the transactional connectivity segment. The addressable market for telecom operators will include some overlap between the home healthcare segment and the transactional segments, and Health IT systems (considered separatly in this report), for operators with Business Services operations :
• Telemedicine solutions - These solutions encompass remote patient condition management for patients with chronic conditions. These platforms are provided through such links as home television and broadband connections directly in the patient’s home.
• Health portal information - Online health portals, such as the Revolution Health portal, were created as a sort of ‘wellness portal’ where users can assess their health risks, set personal goals for physical health and trade information on local physicians. These sites can be viewed as a combination of medical information and social networking sites.
• Personal Medical Devices - Devices integrating sensors able to detect, process and transmit physical parameters are introducing new services and usages. Few devices are available for now, but this segment constitutes a major opportunity in the healthcare market for ICT players.
• Electronic Health Records - Depending on existing policy coordination for EHR, operators might be able to capture a share of the EHR market.
