- Bob, hi, welcome.
How has innovation changed
in the healthcare industry as a result of COVID?
- Well, I would say that COVID had an accelerating impact
across many trends
in the healthcare space, particularly innovation.
We were used to a much longer innovation cycle
for things like drug development, vaccine development,
how to reach patients,
and COVID basically, took
what was generally a five to seven-year timeframe
and crammed it into an 18 month period
and set new expectations
for how long innovation should take in healthcare.
- What does it mean for the industry overall, though?
- Well, it certainly means quite a bit
actually for the industry
in terms of setting new expectations.
If you think about shaving two, three years
off a development cycle,
that has a significant impact both on cost,
but more importantly, on saving lives.
If you can get new therapies to market faster
if you can get new diagnostics
to screen patients for cancer faster,
all of those things matter.
And so I think getting those therapies
and those tests to market quicker,
definitely has a significant impact.
- And what trends are you seeing in the healthcare industry
at the moment that you think will have
- a difficult question! -
but the most impact going forward?
- Look, there are several for sure.
Many of them were actually in place before COVID started,
COVID just accelerated, like a catalyst,
even further, a further catalyst to move things forward.
Some of the biggest ones, obviously,
with the announcement of Kaiser and Geisinger last week,
continued consolidation in the healthcare system,
a shift out of acute care into alternate sites of care.
Think about in the home,
like we all got used to during COVID,
where people were held out of hospitals,
just given infrastructure demands
and shifting care into doctor's offices,
for their care in the home, more consumerism continued.
The fact that no one knew what a molecular test
versus a PCR versus an antigen test was
prior to COVID,
that consumerism, that understanding
of where healthcare comes from,
you know, how we use it,
I think has continued to accelerate.
- Bob, thank you so much.
- Great, thanks, Georgie.