Data-Enabled Growth Strategies Counterbalance Competitive Intensity
With the advent of digitization in healthcare, all industry efforts are geared toward better leveraging this stream of digital data to achieve the goals of precision medicine and precision health. The amount of health data that is becoming available is increasing exponentially each year, with new sources, such as wearable devices and social determinants of health, making such data accessible for care delivery improvement. It is estimated that the healthcare industry generated over 2,000 exabytes (1 exabyte = 10,002 Terabytes) of data in 2020. The question is how can we monetize this data?
For data monetization, healthcare is a unique industry due to two reasons. First, the issues of privacy are more complex in healthcare, governed by an increasingly complicated set of regulations. Second, the source of the data is almost always a patient, but where it is generated (care delivery location, a clinical trial, or academic research), who uses it (physicians, nurses, hospitals, payers, pharmaceutical companies, or MedTech companies), and for what use case (improving care delivery, personalizing medicine, drug/device R&D, or lowering costs) are completely different from other industries.
In this study, we explain the difference between direct and indirect data monetization, how it applies to the healthcare industry and specifically the MedTech sector, provide a framework for MedTech companies to assess the data monetization potential for each of their products, and give examples of monetization for medical devices, surgical equipment, imaging equipment, prostheses and implants, and consumables, along with a final strategic decision-making checklist for MedTech companies to monetize their own data.
Key Issues Addressed
- Why is healthcare data important, and increasing in volume?
- What is data monetization, and what are healthcare use cases and examples?
- How does the MedTech industry leverage data monetization?
- How can MedTech companies assess the data monetization potential for each of their products?
- What are the considerations for MedTech companies before choosing data monetization as a growth strategy?