Moving Beyond the Pill: Data Science to Impact Medicine More than the Drugs Themselves

-- Will pharma survive the headwinds of change in the new healthcare ecosystem?

TOKYO, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The global healthcare industry is in the middle of a massive remix, with disciplines merging and cross-pollinating.  Technology continues to intrude into biology and society, as boundaries shift and disappear.  Progressive healthcare business models are evolving to focus on personalization, communication, decentralization and collaboration.  To keep up, traditional care organizations must capture other areas of the value chain, as the patient becomes the central point of the system.

"The industrial revolution has arrived for the healthcare industry," said Frost & Sullivan Partner Reenita Das during her keynote presentation at the 12th International BIOtech Exhibition and Conference in Tokyo.  Das continued: "in the next 10 years, data science will have more to do with improving medicine than anything you will ever learn in medical school or anything currently being researched in the laboratory."

For a copy of her keynote presentation, Will Pharma Survive the Headwinds of Change in the New Healthcare Ecosystem, please email Anna Tsuji, Corporate Communications, at anna.tsuji@frost.com, with your full name, company name, job title, telephone number, company email address, company website, city, state and country. 

Technology will play a large role in this healthcare evolution, as it shifts care outside of the hospital to the home and facilitates the use of data and analytics to better navigate patient wellness.  Electronic medical records (EMRs) and other data will be the foundation of disease databases, with analytics to develop protocols and appropriate pathways of treatment and diagnosis.  This will move the responsibility and control from individual clinicians to fully documented and approved standards – and more into the patients' hands.

"The consumer will take on the role of the CEO of their own health through increased engagement, access, and empowerment," said Das.  "This belief in the importance of collaboration is coming not only as the result of new technology and data sharing, but it also comes from a fundamental shift in understanding collaboration and the difference between drugs and science.  We must collaborate on science and compete on drugs."  

Additionally, the connectivity of IT solutions that support smaller and cheaper testing solutions will reduce dependence on large, expensive facilities to give individuals greater control over their health and wellness. This patient-centric health system opens the door to new market participants from industries such as retail, telecommunications, wellness/spa, as well as travel and tourism.

This will eventually facilitate customized service through individualized care plans based on one's needs and personal wishes – unique to the point of specificity to one's genomic variations. With this connectivity between users and providers, healthcare will ultimately become a collaborated effort where medical staff work together around the patient through coordinated team work, across disciplines.

The healthcare industry will also become more focused on preventing sickness rather than providing treatment. In 2012, the segment of global healthcare expenditure on treatment was 60 percent, which will significantly decrease to 35 percent by 2025.  This trend toward prevention over treatment after the fact will better support the world's elderly population of 60 years of age or older, which is anticipated to make up a quarter of the global population by 2025.  Additionally, 75 percent of those 60 years of age or older are anticipated to have at least one chronic condition.  By the time this population is 70 years old or more, 50 percent will have two or more chronic conditions. 

"We need to move beyond the pill to better plan for the future of healthcare," said Das. "Demographic changes are one of the biggest mega trends for healthcare, while convergence is the biggest driver of the industry's evolution, cross-pollinating ideas, technologies and applications."

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Contact:
Anna Tsuji
Corporate Communications – Japan
Tel: +81-(0)3-4550-2210
Email: anna.tsuji@frost.com