Joe Corrigan, head of Intelligent Healthcare, Cambridge Consultants part of Capgemini Invent, looks at how the medical and technology industries are colliding and what it means for the delivery of healthcare.
With the slow inevitability of tectonic plates, the medical and technology worlds are colliding. From a distance, it seems that nothing is happening. But the ground is rising. New ways of working are being enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), data and edge computing. Doctors, patients and researchers are – like all of us – immersed in consumer-focused digital services, which adds to the relentless pressure. This means that when a new user-centric medical service is launched, there can be sudden, seismic shifts in behaviour. Being able to foresee or cause these quakes will determine who ends up at the top of the mountain.
Let’s start with the world view from a pharma perspective. It is characterised by extended R&D cycles, leading eventually to the arrival of blockbuster drugs that have successfully negotiated clinical trials, with their ever-escalating costs. Contrast this with technology, the domain of agile development. Test fast, fail fast, learn fast, repeat. User experience is everything, and the ambition to forge personalised customer relationships drives continuous feedback and the dominance of social networks within the all-powerful digital ecosystem. Nevertheless, change is happening – against a backdrop of radical innovation in medical technology and the increasing enthusiasm for digital adoption accelerated by the pandemic.