Insight

People Powered Health

Today the sector faces a wide array of challenges ? from the race to discover the next Penicillin, the increased cost of research and development, and the shrinking margins as drug interventions become more targeted to specific conditions. The economics of medicine and a more demanding customer are placing enormous pressures on the pharmaceutical sector and pushing it to breaking point.

Our People Powered Health report investigates the potential of health-tech innovation in the UK and seeks to understand how technological innovation could change the face of medicine over the next few years. It demonstrates how the wearables market is set to double in 2016 (equivalent to over 5 million smart devices in the UK alone) and how a significant number of first-movers are already sharing health data with their healthcare professional.

Perhaps most exciting of all, it finds that over 70% of us would share our health data with researchers if it led to faster innovations in treatment options.

The implications of our findings for the pharmaceuticals sector are substantial.

At a time when healthcare systems across the world are moving towards more integrated health data collection and dissemination, it provides an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to align more closely with health providers (and payers) ? accessing vital research data and allowing them to demonstrate the effectiveness of their products on a previously unthinkable scale. But we think the implications go further than that and could include:

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  • Being able to monitor long-term illnesses in field at a far larger scale to highlight new drug opportunities.
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  • Fundamentally revolutionising the way in which drug trials are recruited for and executed (including for lower cost).
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  • Highlighting joint-interventions that could improve patient outcomes and experiences (e.g. mobile blood-sugar monitoring apps accompanied by smart insulin pens).

Never before has the spotlight shone so brightly on the pharmaceuticals sector and never before has it faced the wide array of challenges it does today. But our findings demonstrate a wealth of opportunities for the sector to consolidate and grow over the next few years ? if the right lessons and insights are borne in mind. Sometimes, the most challenging of times are also the most exciting of times.

Read more in our report…

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