It is the dawn of a new technology era with driverless cars, robots, and human machine integration. Technology is enabling the creation of business models, disrupting old industries and creating new ones. The pace of change is unprecedented and moving fast.
Healthcare is not immune and is also witnessing rapid change and innovation. Driven primarily by the mobile phone, and connected devices, everything is up for grabs. From smart clothing, to wearables, old technologies are being disrupted and replaced and connected. These new connected stethoscopes, thermometers, contact lenses and clothes, are changing how we manage and track our health, behave and live.
New mediums like augmented reality and virtual reality are emerging to enable immersive storytelling and new ways to learn about medicines and how they work in the body. Driven primarily by the likes of Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift, this brave new world is changing the way we will educate doctors about new medicines.
Applications like Facebook Messenger and WeChat, Artificial intelligence, and natural language processing has created Chat Bots and mobile robots to handle mundane tasks, such as basic diagnosis, appointments, and reminders while new voice activated connected devices such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home provide the ability to interact with the healthcare professional, or caregiver on demand whenever it’s required.
Telemedicine and remote monitoring are rapidly gaining momentum and changing the way hospitals care for patients by connecting healthcare professionals with experts and caregivers, providing access to much needed healthcare to many around the world, particularly in remote areas.
And finally, cognitive computing is enabling the understanding of the large volumes of data that this new technology produces and helps us analyze it to provide us with meaningful insights and new models. This capability is upending the entire drug discovery process and enabling all manner of predictive models to be created.
We are living in the era of rapid and amazing innovation powered by technology that is disrupting the delivery of healthcare around the world.
The Wellness Movement is here to stay and this marks a critical moment for many organizations. Existing brands face new opportunities, but also new challenges – shifting consumer expectations, the emergence of new business models and the proliferation of startup and mature disruptors who seem to understand consumers better than their established counterparts. How brands face these challenges will determine how well they are placed to reap the opportunities that the Wellness Movement will present.
