The Internet cannot be isolated from other advances in healthcare and is playing an important enabling role within the changing healthcare environment. Care for the individual is becoming the focal point of the industry owing to the implementation of electronic patient records that contain data on the individual, and advances in (pharmaco)genomics, whereby drugs are tailored to the genetic predisposition of the individual. Pharmaceutical companies will be forced to focus on the customer relationships, and offer a product/service bundle, since they have to target the physician with patient specific messages. Consumer/patient-centric processes, such as direct marketing and compliance/disease management programmes, will also become important, resulting in a gradual shift of the traditional marketing and sales mix.
The synergistic changes of the genomics and Internet revolution will ignite the genesis of a global health service industry. The formation of the new industry will be further accelerated by the next technology wave, improving the ability to provide highly customised and interactive health services to anybody, any time, anywhere. The potentially positive impact on the healthcare system will materialise only if regulation allows for changing roles of healthcare professionals and patients.
Pharmaceutical players can enter the global health service industry cost-effectively by building services around their own products, which generate incremental product sales. The next step will be an integrated disease service. However, it will prove much more difficult to complete the transformation and provide one-stop-shop consumer/patient centric global health services. Therefore, we might see an acquisition wave when technology adoption accelerates again, and global health services are spotted as the next large multitrillion USD battleground.
