The future of healthcare is digital, collaborative, and built on trust

According to this analysis by MAPFRE Open Innovation (MOi), health and wellness are gaining importance and now hold a crucial position in individual, family, social, and business strategy. And changes already underway are accelerating, such as the digitalization of the sector, the increase in consumer/patient expectations, and their search for comprehensive value propositions.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 72% of people in Spain say they are more concerned about their health, and 87% of HR executives, as reported in this analysis, say that mental health-related ailments have increased significantly among employees.

Customer demand goes beyond traditional medical services. According to the report, empathy and trust have become key factors in ensuring loyalty to healthcare providers. A cardinal issue, already noted by publications such as The Lancet, as one of the decisive factors in preventing infections.

The moves by the main players—both the traditional ones, insurers such as MAPFRE, healthcare groups, pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, and newcomers in tech: startups and giants such as Amazon, Apple, and Google—the maturity of the new tools, and reflections of experts suggest that the future of healthcare will be marked by five major trends.

1. Enthusiasm: Healthcare is the territory that everyone wants to conquer. Nicolas Monsarrat, Head of Healthcare in Europe at Accenture gave his view on the possibility that a single player could set itself up as the Amazon of healthcare. “There will be players of all kinds—large and small, public and private—who will have to cooperate,” he asserted.
2. Interoperability: The cornerstone of the patient experience, in a context marked by the protection of privacy under strict regulation that, according to the report, is a barrier for citizens and institutions. “We would have to think about donating data for science,” noted Luis Martín, CEO of CancerAppy and guest speaker at the colloquium on accelerating change at MAPFRE and Accenture’s private event.
3. Empowerment: Users hold the power and will be able to make use of monitoring devices for medical, sports, and wellness purposes and benefit from advances in genetics that improve prevention and individualized medicine. “We have seen that curing does not make the system sustainable. The key is prevention,” recalled Miquel A. Bru, vice president of Made of Genes.
4. Customization: The technologies that bring personalized and precision medicine closer, with Artificial Intelligence and 3d printing. “We need medicine that takes into account the genetic connotation, our individuality,” said Lluís Montoliu, a biologist and CSIC researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology, interviewed at the event The Pulse of Change where he reflected on rare diseases, advances, and CRISPR genomic editing techniques, among other topics.
5. Home-spitals: Health moves into the home, as the pandemic has clearly demonstrated. This concept, coined by the Economic Forum, which combines the terms “home” and “hospital,” reflects the rise of telemedicine. After the pandemic, of course, but not only. Tensions in the healthcare system, longevity, the need to alleviate some operating costs and the need for human, friendly, and quality care do the rest. “Covid changed everything,” the CEO of Savia acknowledged. Sixty percent of the platform’s users started their first experience with telemedicine during lockdown.

More information at MAPFRE Open Innovation