March 2010
Key trends driving healthcare technology adoption
HEALTHCARE/TECHNOLOGY: The Rise of M-health
➔ Escalating Healthcare Costs: Public healthcare
systems and healthcare insurers are increasingly concerned about the rising cost of delivering care to patients. ➔ Increased R&D Spend in Pharmaceutical
Industries: Implementing wireless applications into discovery & development stages of clinical R&D could reduce time by up to 30%.
Innovative technologies are rapidly transforming healthcare delivery, although there is still work to be done to allay fears about security and overcome inherent resistance to change. M-Health = E-Health ➔ E-health can mean creating electronic versions of patient records across a national system while Mhealth can serve as access points to provide remote information to healthcare providers. These technologies find a wide array of applications that include remote data collection , disease and epidemic tracking and diagnostic and treatment support . ➔ Healthcare telecom spending is expected to grow 44% over the next three years from $8.6 billion to $12.4 billion. The mobile health market will reach an estimated $4.6 billion opportunity by 2014.
➔ Greater Uptake of EMR/EHR: Many healthcare providers are now using Electronic medical records (EMR) and Electronic Health records (EHR). The e-prescription and EMR markets are estimated to reach $166.7 million in 2013. ➔ Reduced Admin Burden: Wireless and online technologies considerably reduce burden on nurses and therapists. Technologies such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), smart phones and Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) can also aid patientcentric healthcare by providing details of patients including clinical histories & lab reports . ➔ Drive towards Evidence Based Decision Making: Electronic medical records (EMRs) offer one way to help align what doctors do & what the best evidence says they should do. At a basic level, EMRs gather & organize health information. But at their best they offer "decision support," reminding the doctor of a test that might be needed, pointing out a worrying health history trend or warning against prescribing the wrong drug. Betting that EMRS will improve quality of care, the Obama administration has earmarked $19 billion to give EMRs to doctors.
Barriers to healthcare technology adoption ➔ Security Concerns & Resistance to Change
Although the implementation of online and mobile health technologies is appealing and impressive, their proliferation into more healthcare fields could take time due to issues like: o potential security breaches o perceptions of unreliability o inherent resistance to change amongst healthcare professionals
COMMUNICATIONS TAKEOUT
• There are many opportunities surrounding the mobile & wireless future of healthcare, not least for those companies involved in the financing or development of these technologies. New products coming to market will need assistance in differentiating their offering in an increasingly crowded marketplace. • In order to overcome industry resistance, change management programmes would help to minimise the challenges placed on healthcare practitioners and support staff. • Negative perceptions can be shifted with sensitive and evidence based communications. WATCH: FUTURE OF WIRELESS MEDICINE http://www.bit.ly/btbwC8
CONSUMER/TECHNOLOGY: Location, Location, Location Location-based services such as FourSquare and Gowalla are being hyped as the “next Twitter” and even the “new Google.” Privacy concerns have so far largely been ignored or glossed over. New Kids on the Block ➔ Location based services could generate nearly $13 billion in revenue by 2014. Location-based mobile spending will hit $4 billion in 2015, an increase of nearly 12,000% from the $34 million spent in 2009.
➔ The obsession with knowing where users are is a sign of the importance of the mobile internet, which is growing more quickly than desktop internet usage did thanks to the availability of highpowered mobile phones, 3G coverage and the pull of social networks. ➔ Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” and Twitter wants to know “What’s happening?” but new social networks are focusing on a different question: “Where are you?” Services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Rummble allow you to “check in” at bars, restaurants, clubs and even offices and railway stations so that your friends know where you are. You can use services on your mobile phone to find places that have been recommended by your friends, or by strangers.
Turf Wars
COMMUNICATIONS TAKEOUT
➔ Now the big players are getting in on the act. Google released a location-based service, Latitude, a while ago and its new social platform, Buzz, can track locations, too and Twitter has begun to experiment with geolocation features. ➔ Meanwhile, according to reports, Facebook will begin allowing its 400 million users to share their location in the next couple of weeks. The aim is to go head to head with Google as a destination for small, local business ad dollars. It makes a lot of sense: with over 400 million users, FB has a veritable wealth of information to mine and sell to small businesses. With the addition of location based data, they’ll also be able to target in-service ads. Privacy concerns ➔ Both Foursquare and Gowalla offer incentives to drive user activity. If you’re the most frequent visitor to a location in Foursquare then you become its “mayor”. Many places, such as cafés, have begun offering discounts to their mayor. Meanwhile Gowalla has begun adding virtual items, such as iPhone cases, that can be collected and used to enter competitions.
➔ However, once the fun of the game element wears off, some users are left with concerns about privacy and worries that they will be targeted with location-specific adverts.
• Foursquare and Gowalla are taking the best practices of traditional marketing and loyalty programmes of the past and tweaking them for today’s media savvy consumers. In so doing, they’re moving customer involvement into a whole new dynamic and could perhaps overtake Twitter in the process. • For companies starting to engage in social media, it is wise to spread involvement across several networks to avoid being left behind when one falls out of favour. • Privacy concerns need to be addressed from an enterprise viewpoint [see next page]. READ: 9 KILLER TIPS FOR LOCATION-BASED MARKETING http://www.bit.ly/dtVkPe
ORGANISATION/TECHNOLOGY: Privacy: a Growth Industry •The public is highly concerned about how its personal information is collected, stored & processed. •Technology companies compete to create new applications that will analyze personal data & meet new needs, such as the ability to broadcast one’s GPS data to family and friends. •The government is interested in access to personal data for law enforcement, regulatory and administrative purposes. •And the media, when not reporting on the latest privacy invasions by companies or government, is publishing “tell-all” stories on anyone viewed as newsworthy. Top Secret ➔ The recession, combined with new technology, is sparking new skirmishes between employers and employees over leaks of sensitive and confidential information. Data loss is a major, often unmeasured, issue for companies. ➔ In a recent survey, 14% of US employees admitted they had sent confidential or potentially embarrassing company emails to outsiders. ➔ From an enterprise viewpoint, the volume of sensitive data has grown exponentially, exposing companies to increasing risks relating to the loss of data. The average annual cost of data loss is $1.8m among enterprises that can quantify it. The majority of data loss goes unreported, or remains undiscovered.
➔ As a result, companies are rushing to change privacy and social media policies and deploy Information Protection technologies to prevent such leaks and losses.
COMMUNICATIONS TAKEOUT
➔ This raises questions of a Big Brother nature,
where policing or blocking of personal email accounts is the norm in corporations. Add to this the conundrum of unregulated microblogging sites such as Twitter and you have a recipe for deep distrust and unrest between companies and employees. Legislation Lagging Behind ➔ More recently a surprising new trend has
emerged, where judges and legal experts are now advocating for enhanced employee rights, especially in relation to electronic privacy. The prevailing norm, however, is for employee emails to be collected and scrutinised because they reside on servers to which employers have access. Cloud computing is bringing yet another dimension to this debate. ➔ The web also ends up reinforcing old power structures as those with the financial and technical resources to do intensive data mining (the management, workforce and investors of tech companies) hold power over those who casually share data. Behavioural tracking and constant optimisation of user interface design and advertising not only allows these companies to satisfy consumer desires, but influence them.
➔ Overall, privacy law is failing to keep pace with technological change.
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• Companies need to maintain a clear IT policy and educate its users on its importance. • Auditing and tracking data loss incidents should be an integral part of any enterprise’s Information Protection Strategy. • Consider the use of private microblogging services like Yammer that offer platforms that are safe from hackers. • Employees need to measure the impact of the information they share online to ensure they are not damaging either their own or their company’s reputation by their personal revelations. Robust social media guidelines are a must. • The instantaneous nature of the internet is changing internal and external communications. Important announcements can no longer be flagged internally days earlier, but should be communicated internally & externally simultaneously. READ: LIFE RECORDERS – WOULD YOU WEAR ONE? http://www.bit.ly/61f0r
HR/ORGANISATION
Fundamentals Become More Important
Social Recruiting
➔ Twitter & Facebook are social media tools and as
Social recruiting is engaging with users and using social media tools to source and recruit talent. This trend is increasingly crossing over from the recruitment industry into corporations.
Reshaping the Search for Talent ➔ Corporate recruiters are getting more proactive and following in the footsteps of recruitment agencies in the use of social networks to provide company information and set up interest groups to source candidates. ➔ CareerBuilder.com found that 37% of surveyed employers plan to put a greater emphasis on social media in 2010 to create a more positive brand for their organisation. ➔ As social media is increasingly used inside companies to increase collaboration, communication and innovation, it has become important for recruiters inside and outside the company to locate prospective employees who are also users of social media. ➔ Some companies are going beyond posting tweets about new positions to using the wisdom of the crowd to write a new job description or to decide on a new job title . This was the case with our own B..L Ochman @whatsnext who crowdsourced the title of her new role “Head of Emerging Technologies” at Burson-Marsteller. This spawned a number of blog posts and dozens of tweets and conversations., all raising the profile of the company and the position.
COMMUNICATIONS TAKEOUT
such they are not going to replace recruiting fundamentals. Instead they will highlight everything that is already wrong with your current recruiting process.
o A badly written job description will not get more attention from great candidates just because you posted it on Facebook or Twitter – in fact it will get less because there is so much more competition now for people’s limited attention. o Attracting more candidates through a clever social media outreach campaign will only make you look bad to more people if your hiring process is flawed. o Candidates who have a poor interview experience with you now have so many more places to voice their disappointment, through Google’s Sidewiki, or Glassdoor, Diigo, Twitter or other emerging sites. And their comments will do more to define your recruiting brand than anything you are thinking about doing with your website. ➔ Social recruiting is about experimentation &
opportunity. At the same time, it is important not to forget that job seekers are in the public eye and respect their privacy. This, of course, works both ways and there have been some high profile cases of potential employees being caught out because they have not measured the impact of their social media exposure. There are even apps to perform psychological profiling on Twitter feeds, so candidates need to think hard before they tweet.
• The rise of social media in the workplace and beyond makes it vitally important that companies ensure social media is integrated into their existing recruitment strategies. • Just registering for a Twitter account & using this for recruiting is not enough. Companies must be authentic, include real voices of their employees and engage Millennials in conversations they are already having online. • As ever when engaging with social media, it is important to have robust and transparent usage guidelines in place. A USER’S GUIDE TO TALENT RECRUITMENT THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA http://www.bit.ly/9F2UG7
CONTACT To request further information, give feedback or suggest a future topic for the newsletter, please contact: Elaine Cameron Strategic Research & Trend Analysis, EMEA elaine.cameron@bm.com And don’t forget to follow on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/FUTUREPersp