Healthcare Industry
The healthcare industry is composed of pharmaceutical actors, biotchs, medtechs as well as private and public healthcare services and insurances.
Innovating and acting all along the patient journey, their activity is as strategic as its economic weight is important.
However, the global performance of the industry in France has been decreasing for years: pressured public spendings and hospitals budgets, increase of medecine prices, slow speed of innovation spread and digital healthcare development.
Issues and challenges of the sector
In the face of changes in society, the economy and public finances, the healthcare system is evolving. The aging of the population, the development of chronic pathologies and the increase in health care and drug expenditures raise questions about the resilience of the health care system.
As the transformation accelerates and the imperatives for innovation intensify (becoming more complex and costly, notably due to current research priorities such as immuno-oncology, new diagnostic solutions, gene therapy, etc.), pressure on the price of drugs and medical solutions is increasing.
The competitiveness of healthcare industries in France is gradually deteriorating: loss of industrial capacity (making France 4th behind Switzerland, Germany and Italy), dropout in terms of clinical trials carried out on the territory, low private investment in companies at the end of the start-up phase, departures of talent trained in France to foreign countries...
The development of generic drugs is making the situation more complex for pharmaceutical companies, which can rely less and less on "situation rents". The limited duration of patents and the competition that follows forces laboratories to constantly search for new drugs.
The needs for healthcare products and solutions are evolving. For example, healthcare customers or patients are increasingly sensitive to preventive approaches to their health. More broadly, the emergence of 4P medicine (predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory) offers a large number of opportunities. Actors in the sector are then encouraged to rethink their positioning and their mode of operation.
Health is also an important public and territorial issue. Inequalities are emerging and are tending to widen with regard to conditions of access to healthcare and the distribution between urban and hospital medicine.
The impact of the healthcare industry, and in particular the pharmaceutical industry, remains very high from an environmental point of view: molecules derived from hormonal substances or antibiotics severely affect animal and plant ecosystems, and the recycling chain for both drugs and medical equipment is not yet fully optimized.
What are the priority actions for the players in the healthcaresector?
Define new ways to communicate with patients and users
Real-time medical treatment tracking, organizing and facilitating patients’ communities to help them overcome their sickness are among the new ways to accompany patients. It allows to offer global healthcare solutions to the patients and to improve their handling.
The healthcare industry is able to succeed a transition toward a personalized medecine odel, based on the coordinated use of technologies and services.
Improve the use of health data with safety and privacy
Integrating digital technologies (cloud, cybersecurité, big data, AI, obotics, IoT, blockchain…) allows to find better solutions to rise to the challenges of the sector.
Digitization of medical files added to the increasing capabilities of data treatment paved the way to the use of algorythms in the industry.
It takes an important place in the development of new drugs to help measuring the usage, the efficiency and tolerance to these new solutions outside of clinical trials. Though a massive amount of “real life data” must be available.
Accelerate digitization of Healthcare
Reduce environmental impact of médicine
The medecine of 4Ps now can lay on digitzation of health data, continuous collect and exploitation all along the value chain of the sector as patients and professionals share these data.
As all kinds of industries, the healthcare sector is constrained by a growing envirnomental pressure. Not only the production’s environmental impact has to be streamlined (greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and use of raw materials), the recycling of medicines and equipments needs to be more performant.
Case studies
Abbvie
Pfizer
Laboratoires Pierre Fabre
Axa
Groupe Vyv
Essilor
Malakoff Humanis