Interview to Roberto Ascione, CEO of Publicis Healthware International (Publicis Healthcare Communications Group Company)
It is a really hard question, mainly because there can be many answers!
In other words we live in a time where digital is so broad that we can recognize many trends in many different fields such as content, participation, platform, access devices, web services, web marketing, etc.
Those who focus on one trend at a time are perhaps losing one key aspect of digital that is to say its multi-dimensional essence.
Narrowing the outlook to digital in healthcare I would say the most important trend is the quick development of the e-health.
By e-health we can consider the entire healthcare world in the on-line dimension thus including all its players, relationships, interests, opportunities, risks, etc.
As we all know the Internet was early adopted as a research and documentation tool by biologists and clinical researchers then a growing interest raised around its usage as an educational tool by allowing patients to access to an unparalleled amount of information, etc.
More recently participative web (so called web 2.0) added a further and powerful tool to the healthcare usage of the Internet.
On the other hand an increasingly number of applications and on-line services are being made available to the users by all healthcare players including institutions and providers.
The conjunction of all these dynamics and opportunities with the surprisingly high number of people that use the web for health related purposes is really driving the growth of the e-health.
For instance the traditional physician-patient relationship takes now place also on-line. This ‘e-relationship’may deal with its ‘off-line’ counterpart really changing the traditional way the two main players interact each other up to replace it with something new that nobody really knows…
This is only one example of the many more that we are discovering and facing day by day.
Another good example of what is (and what will be even more in the future) part of the e-health concept is the coming ‘tailored or personal medicine’ scenario.
As becoming more and more clear the drugs of the future will be more than today and much more targeted to specific small (or very small) groups of patients.
The choice of the right option based on a maybe also tailored diagnostic pathway will require to consider, handle and integrate an increased number of information. Then e-health tools and resources will provide for patient history, best practices, diagnostic date interpretations, patients educational resources to increase understanding and compliance, etc.
In conclusion I guess the e-health will become the main dimension of the healthcare as we know it today and the e-health paradigms will let us rethink to a number of well established practices, relationships, business models, etc.
