The Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center
The Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center is a collaborative group of cross industry CEOs and senior decision makers, all of whom share a passion for dramatically improving healthcare. These senior leaders are committed to a clear and compelling purpose: Champion proven innovations in the market; envision market-based solutions to today’s and tomorrow’s challenges; and harness the power of convergence through extra-industry partnerships.
Oliver Wyman has long held the view that if we focus on Health, healthcare will transform. The Health Innovation Center envisions a future with amazing potential where consumers engage in their health supported by the best of retail services and social media, doctors promote prevention rather than repair, hospitals treat diseases rather than one-off episodes, new players from different industries join in to support the patient in remarkable new ways, private capital flows to the best ideas that improve health—all coalescing to a point where value is the currency of competition, outcomes are better, costs are lower, and healthcare’s decades-long downward economic spiral is reversed.
The Health Innovation Center is firmly grounded not only in ideas but in actions. Much of what is needed to fix the system has already been developed but not diffused. Our goal is to mainstream the proven innovations and accelerate their development and adoption cycles. The next generation of innovation promises to dwarf the impact of the current advancements as social media, big data, and genomics technologies come of age. This convergence of forces is the moment to fix the broken value equation in healthcare.
IN FOCUS
What is the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center trying to achieve?
The Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center is squarely focused on the power of industry leaders working together to change healthcare. As such we created an Advisory Board comprised of 40 CEOs, senior decision-makers, and thought-leaders across health systems, healthcare IT companies, social media players, genomics and advanced diagnostic companies, health plans, pharma and biotech firms, physician organizations, wellness and lifestyle organizations, retailers, financial institutions, and academic institutions.
Through collaboration, the Advisory Board and the Health Innovation Center are rethinking healthcare in a way that breaks silos, connects activities, aligns incentives, and reimagines business models. In doing so we’ve developed a vision of three broad waves of transformation that will occur over the next 15 years: (1) patient-centered care, (2) retail and the engaged consumers, and (3) personalization and the science of prevention. As each of these waves is explored, the Health Innovation Center will form a collective view of the new health marketplace and how value will migrate between the “today” and the “tomorrow” business designs. Along the way, the group will also develop a perspective on a series of key questions: how global, how much convergence and consolidation, how retail, and how deeply will social media penetrate.
Healthcare must compete on value. There’s no reason not to. We already have business and clinical models that leapfrog the status quo but must be diffused to the millions where this type of care is out of reach. Anything less is a modern tragedy.
Tom Main
Oliver Wyman
Partner and U.S. Market Leader
Health & Life Sciences
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What is your vision for the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center?
The short answer is to ignite a private sector movement that fundamentally shifts healthcare from a system that rewards volume to one that delivers unforeseen value. We want to be a champion for positive change in healthcare.
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How do you plan to make that vision come to life?
We are positioning the Health Innovation Center as a key advocate in the market to help disseminate proven market innovations and speed up adoption. Beyond spreading proven innovations, we want to help incubate new game changers through a forum in which leaders across sectors can collaborate and develop new ideas that will transform the market. We need to evangelize a bit too, which means we’ll be publishing our ideas and sharing them broadly.
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What are the top strategic issues the OWHIC will be tackling?
First and foremost we need to make sure that we capture the $500 billion in value that’s possible through the early shift to value and patient-centered care. The savings generated must be invested in ways that keeps the momentum building toward a culture of health that permeates everything that touches the health ecosystem. We are already seeing care models that address specific populations, diseases, episodes, and conditions but they must be the norm not a pilot. None of this will happen if payment models and incentives are not aligned with the type of collaborative and coordinated care that supports these new ways of delivering care. I also think we need to pay much more attention to cross-sector partnership. We see more than $1 trillion of value rotating from the old models to the new and creating more than a dozen new $10 billion high-growth markets emerging from the convergence of retail, technology, social media, health, and wellness. And in the end we need to reward those that take risks and invest in this new world of healthcare so we will pay attention to how to commercialize the most promising value-based healthcare concepts.
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How do you see the transformation of healthcare happening?
In the near term, we must start where the system is most broken – the 25% of the population driving 80% of healthcare cost. Within this polychronic and at-risk group are the substantial savings that can fund the investment in wellness and prevention, which will flatten the healthcare spending curve over the long term by keeping the next generation healthy. It’s around this dynamic of addressing the distinct needs of patient populations that you will see innovators and new entrants because that’s where they can capture value and have an impact. It’s not a new phenomenon. The last decade saw the convergence of the technology, telecommunications, media, and consumer electronics value chains: New industry players transformed the value proposition to the consumer, and multi-chain players blew by single value-chain players who clung to old and sometimes irrelevant business models. We expect to see a similar convergence in healthcare’s future. The good news is current innovators in healthcare have created a path that provides guidance for where new players will place their bets. But, once convergence starts and investments are made, incumbents that don’t continue to innovate will be hard-pressed to catch up and keep up. Traditional boundaries will blur, the basis of healthcare competition will be redefined, and the pace of innovation will accelerate and create a value gap that may be impossible for laggards to overcome.