eHealth
APAC’s diverse markets suffer from a chronic and escalating healthcare demand burden. These secular pressures overwhelm a constrained supply of medical professionals, with the pandemic highlighting the fragility of this imbalance. The silver lining is that APAC has become an incubator for global innovation in eHealth as traditional payer-providers recognize the need to escalate change.
1. How would you describe the current state of the eHealth industry? What major trends or developments have you observed recently?
Sink or swim time for eHealth startups. A significant portion of eHealth business models in APAC have started off by focusing on the customer and building a better value proposition compared to their traditional alternatives. While this led to enhanced customer experience and engagement, it is accompanied by a costly cash burn which, at the time, venture investors were willing to fund. That environment of capital abundance has changed and there is a concerted focus on the ‘path to profitability’ and supporting business model innovation. eHealth players in the region have pivoted quickly towards B2B models, with several moving into insurer services (e.g., TPA) and offline care provision. Startups that survive will need a clear path to profitability underpinned by a sustainable business model.
An ‘awakening’ of Traditional healthcare companies. The pandemic was a crucible for ‘offline’ stakeholders in the APAC healthcare markets. Notoriously traditional and slow-moving provider groups experienced extreme stress and were forced to ‘rethink’ the way care is and should be provided. After almost 3 years of fire-fighting and bootstrap innovation, both providers and payers are making concerted efforts to digitally transform. Consequently, we’ve seen a flurry of provider-led apps and technology capex investment. While starting from behind, these solutions will have a head start on delivering omnichannel experiences given existing infrastructure.
2. Can you highlight some of the most impactful technological advancements that are driving innovation in eHealth solutions?
Most recently, it’s been the telephone. I don’t mean to belittle all the great eHealth innovation that has come to market, including remote patient monitoring, clinical decision-making support and so on. The point here is that the technology to support eHealth has been around for a long time and, instead, it’s the openness of traditional providers to adopt these technologies ‘at scale’ that is changing. NHS 111 (UK), for example, is a free number to call when you have an urgent healthcare need that is not a life-threatening situation, and it has been around for over a decade. Virtual care is not new, it is just finally becoming the norm.
Going forward, AI will change everything. A few years ago, we were expecting that automation and AI would allow clinicians to spend more time with patients and enable them to make better decisions. Fast forward to today and we have AI medical chatbots that are passing medical licensing exams. In an environment where medical professionals are scarce, and demand is relentless with escalating costs, we will need to fundamentally rethink the way that healthcare is delivered and the role of technology.
3. Telemedicine has seen significant growth, especially in light of recent global events. How do you see this trend evolving, and what challenges does it present for the eHealth sector?
Telemedicine is here to stay. Telemedicine adoption increased dramatically through the pandemic and recent data on active users from the region’s top digital health apps has shown that the telehealth usage is persisting with a wide range of sustainable use cases. Across the region, hospitals that stood up telemedicine capabilities through the pandemic are doubling down on their technology investments; both internal systems and patient facing applications.
eHealth players need to build trust. Trust is essential to any productive patient relationship with their healthcare provider and is something that has historically been built (slowly) upon tangible assets like the credentials of the physician, the long-standing hospital infrastructure, or even the referral of a close family member or friend. Customer surveys from our ‘Frontline of Healthcare in APAC Report’ reported a significant increase in consumer trust in eHealth companies from 2019 to 2021 in several APAC markets, including China, Indonesia and Singapore. Furthermore, several eHealth startups in APAC are actively making the transition from a ‘digital health co’ towards a ‘healthcare co’, with a much broader mandate for a given patient’s health.
4. How are eHealth solutions enhancing patient engagement and improving overall healthcare experiences?
Expand accessibility. Digital delivery models have a distinct advantage over physical locations and providers and can help alleviate healthcare disparity. For example, access to healthcare is uneven across Indonesia. Metropolitan regions have almost five times the number of physicians as remote areas and patients residing in cities are often deterred by traffic and long waiting times. eHealth platforms in Indonesia have enabled patients to manage appointments, prescription delivery, lab testing, consultations, and other services through a single point of contact.
5. Can you discuss the significance of partnerships in advancing digital health initiatives?
Aligned incentives. eHealth flourishes in an environment where incentives are aligned between payers and providers. Fully integrated payer-provider systems in the US and UK, for example, had been investing heavily in eHealth well before the pandemic forced their hands. Conversely, we see resistance to eHealth when hospitals fear the cannibalization of physical visits in favor of cheaper virtual consults, or insurers that fear higher utilization with easy to access eHealth services. These ‘conflicts’ disappear when each stakeholder is fully aligned to managing outcomes, experience, and costs. Payer-provider-digital health partnerships will play an important role in aligning these incentives and allowing digital health to thrive.
6. What do you envision as the future of eHealth?
Single (digital) point of care. More than 90% of surveyed consumers in Southeast Asia consumers want a simpler system of care—a single touchpoint to manage all their healthcare needs. That need is being fulfilled differently across the region. Digitally native companies are racing to provide this in markets like Indonesia, where primary care is limited, emboldened by the fact that one-third of survey respondents prefer that the ‘single touchpoint’ be virtual (an app or a hotline). The question to ask is which stakeholder within each healthcare system will win the right to lead this single point of care. Insurers may have control over spend, but to what extent are they trusted to guide healthcare pathways today? Which population segments might be open to that ‘single point of care’ role being managed by an eHealth company?
Care everywhere. The notion of hospitals as de facto healthcare providers is slowly fading away. The industry is rapidly moving toward delivery models that are more convenient for consumers and less expensive to deliver, and care is moving outside hospital walls. A simpler pathway to care can increase population health overall. eHealth will play an important role in enabling the ‘last mile’ delivery of healthcare services into the home or mobile phone.
Seamlessly connected O2O care. Digital healthcare isn’t replacing established systems; rather, it’s enabling more connected, hybrid experiences. Integrated offline-to-online models have the potential to deliver better patient experience while optimizing cost and efficiencies for care providers. We expect to see unhindered flow of information between healthcare companies’ online and offline delivery models and along the care continuum. Patients will also be guided toward the right delivery model as telehealth develops.
Lastly, a transformation of traditional healthcare providers. The public health crisis forced traditional healthcare providers to accelerate innovation plans and deliver care in new, patient-centric ways. Patients have always been important. That did not—and will not—change. But now, healthcare companies are beginning to understand what’s important to patients. The future of healthcare will be characterized by a transformation of this traditional healthcare sector with patient-centricity and tech-enablement emerging as new norms.
