Innovating for the Individual

Innovative technology is making healthcare more personal—and, with a bit of ingenuity, this can mean better outcomes for everyone. In the latest in WIRED’s series on life-changing technologies, PA Consulting’s experts describe how leaders from all sectors can learn from how the healthcare industry is combining human insight and innovative technology to create a positive future for us all. 

There’s nothing more personal than health, yet healthcare doesn’t always reflect this. Diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment usually happen where clinicians work, not where patients live. But the rise of technologies such as sensors, robotics, and digital therapeutics is changing this dynamic, opening up a world of care focused on the individual that improves outcomes throughout life.

By shifting routine medical treatments to the home, patients can receive the same level of care without having to travel to a medical center, reducing journey times, removing the chance of exposure to disease, lowering anxiety—and giving people more of their regular life back. But making this change is not as simple as it sounds.

“Moving care out of a medicalized environment requires deep human insights: understanding people’s preferences, behaviors, cultures, and experiences, and how they interact with technologies designed to support them,” says Stephen Morehouse, a life sciences expert at PA Consulting. “Only by intensely studying the individual, and taking that insight into design, can the technologies create outcomes that are truly life-changing.” 

New technologies have enabled us to improve care by bringing it closer to the patient. A flagship project for PA’s chief innovation officer, Frazer Bennett, was with Monica Healthcare, now part of GE Healthcare, where the team combined human-factor insights with smart-sensor tech to create wearables that monitor the health of babies, even before they were born. Similarly, the Owlet Smartsock, created by design experts from the same team, watches over sleeping infants in the home, tracking vital signs using pulse oximetry that was previously restricted to hospital use. 

“Value in these innovations scales in all directions. Babies are protected, mothers are reassured, and this safer and better experience also frees up precious resources like much-needed hospital beds and staff, creating efficiencies for the healthcare system as a whole,” Bennett says. “Making it personal, thinking about where activity happens, can not only personalize the experience for users, patients, and customers, but also have profound commercial, economic, and societal advantages.” 

Delivering a Personalized Experience En Masse

The good news is that it’s increasingly possible to have a personalized experience at scale and speed. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, British local authorities needed to check in on clinically vulnerable citizens who were quarantining at home. In one local authority alone, that number totaled 53,000 people. Given Covid-19 restrictions in place in the UK, it was impossible to hire enough personnel to individually call—let alone physically visit—all affected individuals. The health authorities needed a solution, fast, and contacted PA’s team.

Within a matter of days, the consultants conceived, designed, and implemented a new system: the Wellbeing Automated Call Service. Using their deep insights into patient behaviors, the team created a human-replicating experience and used Amazon Web Services’ Connect platform to make outbound bot calls to 200,000 people. “If they needed help, the bot triaged the request and patched the individual through to a human call handler,” says Nick Wake, an agile delivery expert at PA. The real surprise? How warm the response was from patients, who talked to the bot as if it were a human being and reported that, in a really worrying time, the call made them feel valued and cared for.

“The really exciting thing about the approach is that the core technique—quickly repurposing existing technologies and combining them with deep behavioral insight—is applicable across any industry,” says Steve Carefull, an operational improvement expert at PA. “The same technology could, for example, be used for back-to-work readiness calls to tens of thousands of employees post-pandemic or in any situation where information needs to be quickly and consistently shared, be it to customers, employees, or patients.”

Encouraging Adoption of Innovative Technologies

Though there’s often a danger that innovative technologies will fail to be embraced by users and will fall flat, they can lead to incredible outcomes. Take robots. A nursing home in England might not be the place you’d expect to see a Japanese robot exoskeleton in action—yet the PA team delivered Europe’s first care sector collaborative robots (or “cobots”), which allow external exoskeletons to protect workers as they deliver physical care such as lifting and moving patients. With thorough training, a thoughtful rollout, and deep attention to how users experienced the technology, the results were fantastic. As Lesley Grant, a healthcare expert at PA, says, “It enables more personalized care for the patients and maintains their dignity and privacy.”

In Norway, robots are mimicking consumer products to remind patients when to take their medication and to control the quantity available to them, speaking directly to the patients and communicating other information through light and text displays. “One of the patients using the robot was in his 40s and had Parkinson’s disease, and had to take his medicine at exactly the right time,” says Grete Kvernland-Berg, Norway country head and government expert at PA. “He went from staying at home more or less in his bed, to going out on skis. Another patient likes her robot so much she brings it with her everywhere.” The benefits from the program included reduced amounts of home healthcare visits, increased feelings of safety, positive health effects, and boosted levels of activity. 

Adds Elizabeth Lee, a digital expert at PA, “The key thing leaders need to understand about introducing new, innovative technologies like robots is you need to create solutions thoughtfully designed around users.”

Success can often beget success. Referring to wearable devices that monitor heart rate, Lee asks, “How might we use this technology in concert with other digital therapeutics to detect anxiety and treat it through an app? How do we use this technology with artificial intelligence to better prevent strokes? And how can this technology complement human interaction and care? These are the sorts of questions we help our clients answer every day, as they seek to find new opportunities for care and new revenue streams. The real magic is the potential for each new product or solution to lay the foundation for additional innovations and lines of business. The possibilities are endless.”

What’s Next in Human-centric Care?

The outlook is nothing but exciting, with a range of new technologies set to personalize healthcare ever further. Take, for example, continued advances in genome sequencing. Before long, scientists are expected to have the ability to create a genetic blueprint for every individual, providing physicians and pharma and biotech companies with an invaluable tool to develop bespoke therapies and treatment regimes.

And today, PA scientists at its Global Innovation and Technology Center are accelerating the development of Ori Biotech’s platform technology to enable the production of cell and gene therapies at market scale. In the future, this will make it possible for patients to get access to high-quality, affordable cell therapies much earlier. Coming soon are projects designed to modify genes to treat a wider range of diseases, including those that are currently untreated.

Paolo Siciliano, a life sciences expert at PA, believes there’s never been a better time to be in the pharma and biotech industry. “As a species, we’re barely scratching the surface of what we can achieve,” he says. “The power of IoT and Big Data analytics, combined with a better understanding of the human psyche, is opening up incredible opportunities to create innovative technologies that deliver more personalized, more meaningful care. The future is very bright indeed.” 

Technology has the potential to answer many of the world’s toughest challenges, but it requires human ingenuity to unleash it. PA Consulting, in partnership with WIRED Brand Lab, shares insights on what it takes to develop and deliver life-changing technology.

This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for PA Consulting.