The international Healthcare Mover 2019 study by ConCeplus, headed by Beatus Hofrichter, partner of the Healthcare Shapers, highlights a new dynamic in investment and innovation behavior among leading healthcare stakeholders. The benchmark analysis sheds the light on three key business drivers which agile firms master significantly well in shaping their competitive future positioning.

A qualitative, international benchmark study across 6’800 Life Science companies, ICT firms and Healthcare providers in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK revealed, that innovative and agile companies advance stronger in digitalization than their peers. We observe that the dynamics of the digital transformation in these markets differ significantly. In the forefront are the Scandinavian countries and Canada. Their companies deploy a strong digital offering already.

A total of +1’250 companies were validated (or 18.3%) and rank as “Healthcare Movers” (or HCM) in shaping the digital transformation. HCM players understand the importance of focusing their strategic investments across three key drivers, i.e. Data acquisition strength of the clinical, device, medical, and public data domains, Next-level technology strength, and Business model agility.

The Top 100 Healthcare Movers

Furthermore, the Top 100 HCM cohort outperforms the average HCM peer companies significantly. They shape and deploy highly aspiring integrative healthcare business models in combination to the other two drivers well ahead of the core industry. HCM leaders can often be associated with therapeutic fields such as Cardiology, Neurology, Oncology incl. Urology and Gynecology, Radiology, and Nutrition/Dietitian which scores high in the HCM ranking.

Today, healthcare stakeholders compete globally and fiercely for market shares in this multi-trillion USD industry. Traditionally, critical competitive edges were sought through incremental product-centric innovations. In the past years, innovative leaders pursued novel offerings applying integrated digital solutions. According to Mr. Hofrichter, founder of ConCeplus and author of the HCM report, “… tomorrows’ competitiveness in healthcare is founded on agile convergence innovation through combining adjacent technologies, cross-disciplinary competencies, ICT capabilities, and patient-centric offerings in order to establish higher value outcomes.”

Real World Evidence drives value

Today, it is evident, that “… healthcare is rapidly shifting to use Real world evidence to enrich medical data sets…”, according to Dr. Bürgi-Krishnamurthy, co-author of the report. Leading HCM players score high in Data acquisition strength (averaging 3.3 out of the 4 key healthcare data domains). They aim to maximize this driver throughout their daily operation and within established value chains. Here, they pursuit a strong competitive advantage, while traditional firms remain to acquire such data within their inherited technology field(s). (see Fig. 1)

Average data acquisition strength of HCMs across the four key data
domains in healthcare in 2019 [ in %]

Another essential contributing factor to tomorrows HCM winners are the Next-level technology strength, and Business model agility. Global Top 100 HCMs can be seen as avant-garde. They set a challenging benchmark score of business model agility (0.71pts) and next level technologies (0.69pts). This cohort outperforms the average HCM companies significantly (see Fig. 2), while traditional players will be more exposed to a widening competitive gap.

Strategic positioning of HCM companies in 2019 

Partner for leading healthcare value chains

The report highlights the “…ICT players as partners to Life Science firms will even be more crucial in the advancement of deploying holistic integrated platforms. They are seen as the best facilitators for data acquisition across all healthcare domains. Therefore, such firms continue to advance as key partners for leading healthcare value chains, …” commented Beatus Hofrichter, initiator of the HCM report and partner of the Healthcare Shapers

Find out more about the Healthcare Movers 2019 Report