“The doctors do their altruistic job and that’s it. They don’t know how to post on Instagram, promote their services or listen to the customers’ needs”That’s what an executive of a pharmaceutical company, leader in the eye care and medical aesthetics sector, told me yesterday about their customers.Curious to find and read more about this statement I bumped into an article a survey conducted by McKinsey back in 2016 and 2018 respectively in an attempt to show how digitally advanced are the industries. It is interesting to see that healthcare and pharmaceuticals lag behind when it comes to digitisation. See for example transactions and digitization of work in the first graph. The second graph then speaks for itself.
What is the reason? A Harvard Business Review article about AI-based technologies and patient behaviour may shed some light:
“AI-based health care technologies are being developed and deployed at an impressive rate. AI-assisted surgery could guide a surgeon’s instrument during an operation and use data from past operations to inform new surgical techniques. AI-based telemedicine could provide primary care support to remote areas without easy access to health care. Virtual nursing assistants could interact with patients 24/7, offer round-the-clock monitoring, and answer questions. But harnessing the full potential of these and other consumer-facing medical AI services will require that we first overcome patients’ skepticism of having an algorithm, rather than a person, making decisions about their care.The reason, we found, is not the belief that AI provides inferior care. Nor is it that patients think that AI is more costly, less convenient, or less informative. Rather, resistance to medical AI seems to stem from a belief that AI does not take into account one’s idiosyncratic characteristics and circumstances. People view themselves as unique and we find that this belief includes their health. Other people experience a cold; “my” cold, however, is a unique illness that afflicts “me” in a distinct way. By contrast, people see medical care delivered by AI providers as inflexible and standardised — suited to treat an average patient but inadequate to account for the unique circumstances that apply to an individual.”
Maybe it is not the phycisian’s job to post on Instagram nor is the patient obliged to get rid of their beliefs.Each one of us though, active in the healthcare industry, carry the responsibility to connect the world and deliver even greater value to our ecosystem. Digital is the means to realization.