Category: Healthcare

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked a dramatic acceleration in the adoption of digital health tools throughout Asia, rapidly transforming consumer behavior. Today, as governments lift restrictions and patients become more comfortable with in-person doctor’s appointments, telemedicine usage has remained resilient. At MyDoc, a telemedicine platform headquartered in Singapore, the number of monthly active users grew 272% from January 2019 to January 2021. Registered users also rose 65% year over year. Similarly, Chinese digital health platform Ping An Good Doctor saw an 18% increase in newly registered users and a 24% increase in daily consultations in 2020 compared with 2019. While usage has declined from its pandemic peak, it is evident that telemedicine is here to stay.

As physicians drastically reduced primary care visits, telemedicine platforms quickly became the first touchpoint on the patient journey. Physicians can treat a majority of teleconsultation cases virtually. MyDoc, for instance, manages or resolves nearly 78% of cases on the platform. For the remaining cases, telemedicine serves as a point of triage to in-person services, across general practitioners, specialists, accident and emergency clinics, and more. In steering patients through the healthcare system, telemedicine is improving patient outcomes, reducing patient and payer costs, and alleviating the burden of overcrowded hospitals to make healthcare systems more efficient. Leading payers and providers will continue to incorporate telemedicine services into their core offerings to enhance the patient experience and optimize resources.  

Covid-19 severely disrupted pharmaceutical supply chains, issuing a loud warning to the industry: Far-flung manufacturing sites carry a perilous risk. But the pandemic wasn’t the first alarm. While the transfer of pharma sourcing and manufacturing to Asia has lowered costs, it has also directly affected supply chain reliability. Data from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shows an increase in prepandemic drug shortages resulting from several factors, including quality issues and disruptive events, such as the 2017 fire at a Chinese plant that led to a global shortage of piperacillin/tazobactam.

The winner-take-all generic pharmaceutical bidding process in Germany also has produced drug shortages by reducing the number of producers or bidders over time. In some cases, for example, the winners were sales offices dependent on foreign third-party manufacturers incapable of delivering high drug volumes.

The public-private partnerships forged in the heat of Covid-19 could change our very conception of what’s possible in healthcare.

In part two of our healthcare series we’ll consider how Covid ushered in a concept that has enormous implications for investors: healthcare as national defense.

“This notion of healthcare as national defense took hold when our country realized we didn’t have enough ventilators and PPE at the beginning of the pandemic, and we didn’t have a local supply chain to be able to secure it,” Nirad Jain says.

The partnerships that formed between the public and private sectors will not only outlast Covid, they could remove what once seemed like immovable obstacles to drug development, IT investments, payment processing, and home care.

A micro-battle mindset and Win-Scale-Amplify approach can enable healthcare providers to recover the backlog and transform productivity through innovation.