Growing Pains: The Evolution Toward Consumer-Driven Medicine

The piece-parts now exist. The context supports disruptive change. Advances in molecular science and personalized medicine will further increase consumer demand. Private investors are seeking promising opportunities in care delivery. Major non-healthcare players are looking for opportunities to bring their know-how in scale, high performance, and technology infrastructure to health care.

What stands in the way of this transformation; of the creation of a robust new front end to health care: the “Consumer Health Ecosystem?” Several critical barriers will be identified and approaches to addressing them discussed, including: consumer readiness, the creation of successful business models, the need to deliver disruptive levels of performance and cost compared to the traditional care delivery solutions, the resistance of the traditional care system to changes that threaten their well-being, the ability to scale, and the ability to create integrated primary health platforms that combine the individual applications.