What will be the impact of the web on healthcare services?
As so often the Dutch are leading the way when it comes to new healthcare models. We’re told that the launch of new websites for specific conditions which empower the individual patient are working well.
As well as allowing patients to discuss their condition with fellow sufferers, the websites also enable them to easily contact local carers who have been trained to understand and treat their condition. So an MS sufferer can identify the physiotherapist who has MS qualifications in her town.
Change in healthcare is always slow, but it is hard for us to envisage a situation in which websites like this – either run privately, by patient associations or by payors – do not proliferate over the next decade across Europe. It will go hand in hand with the development of healthcards.
There are several implications from this. Firstly it clearly empowers the patient. It will make it much easier for them to pinpoint and select experts. There is a danger for private healthcare service operators that this will make it much easier for people like physiotherapists and specialist nurses to freelance. If all you are doing is taking a commission for recruitment agency transactions you would be hard hit.
As users become more sophisticated so corporate brands may become less effective. The patient will increasing want to know about the expertise of the individual surgeon.
At the same time the web generally should make it possible for more and more specialist healthcare service companies to develop in large conurbations. This we are already seeing. When my daughter had an ear badly blocked by wax I was able to google and get treatment within 24 hours in London.
The people who look most vulnerable to the development of such websites are in medtech and to a lesser extent pharma. In the Netherlands the plan is for the municipalities to aggregate buying power and for the individual carers to then ride on the back of those savings. Medtech is perhaps the last industry left where companies can charge massively higher margins in neighbouring countries, the last industry left where prices can vary enormously from channel to channel. The web is going to erode that over the next decade.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Max Hotopf or call 0207 183 3779.
