Ninety percent of U.S. healthcare leaders and 84 percent of global healthcare leaders recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) say information technology will be a "key factor" for transforming healthcare today and in the decade to come.
In a new "HealthCast" report released April 9 by PwC's Health Research Institute, researchers said the use of technology to improve access to healthcare "will finally become reality over the next 10 years." This will include the use of smart phones, telemedicine, remote medical monitoring, online consultations and educational health chat rooms, they said.
PwC analyzed the influence of consumerism, genomics and the Internet on healthcare and surveyed 590 leaders of health plans, providers, government, employers, physician groups and pharmaceutical and life science firms in 20 countries. The research included more than 200 in-depth interviews in 25 countries.
"From a business/economic perspective, PwC is extremely bullish on prospects for dramatic improvements in healthcare," according to a PwC spokeswoman. "The healthcare system is really getting 'wired up' and will provide major cost savings in the very near term."
There will also be a greater focus on outcomes. “
Ninety percent of healthcare today has no real outcome measures,” said Wilbert J. Keon, MD, founding director general of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. “There is tremendous duplication, waste and absence of quality.”
Healthcare savings will come from a greater focus on patient involvement in care, the study said.
There are provisions included in the new healthcare reform laws that will increase emphasis on prevention, positive health outcomes, better coordination of care and comparative effectiveness research that includes personalized medicine, researchers said. The new legislation "will pave the way for a new era of individualized care."
Kelly A. Barnes, health industries leader at PwC said, "If patients are not engaged, it is impossible to adequately manage care, consumption and spending."
"The overarching challenge for our health system will be to shift the internal focus from the siloed bureaucratic healthcare infrastructure that exists today to one that puts patients at the center of care and engages them to take charge of their health over their entire lifetime," Barnes said.
“Transforming the internal focus of the health system will mean re-engineering virtually all components of the health infrastructure – communication systems, doctor-patient roles and responsibilities, and perhaps even the most challenging aspect of care, hard-wired habits and traditions,” said David M. Levy, MD, Global Healthcare Sector Leader, PwC.
The PwC survey found that 58 percent of U.S. health leaders and 45 percent of global health leaders expect personalized medicine to be "an important and growing development" that will change healthcare delivery.
Diagnostic tests based on human genome research will become commonplace, researchers said. This will lead to the targeted use of medicines based on a patient's DNA, thus cutting costs on wasted drugs and unwanted side effects in patients for whom those drugs are ineffective, the study said.
