New Business Models and Changing Customer Behaviors are Creating Dramatic Shifts in the APAC Healthcare Industry

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The Asia-Pacific (APAC) healthcare industry is undergoing rapid transformation with a dramatic shift in consumer behavior and expectations, opening up growth opportunities across diagnostics, regenerative medicine, medical tourism and digital health. The positive growth is fuelled by increasing adoption of new technology, innovative healthcare access programs, and delivery of care outside traditional hospital settings. Frost & Sullivan projects a revenue growth of over 12% in 2018, making APAC one of the fastest growing regions for the healthcare industry in the world.

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Asia-Pacific Healthcare Outlook, offers our experts’ top eight predictions for the APAC healthcare industry, along with insights on key trends, such as insurance modernization, clinical trials digitalization, cloud and AI adoption, and medical imaging transformation, as well as revenues across key industry sectors. APAC country snapshots of Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam are also provided.

“Through digital transformation healthcare companies are introducing service-orientated business models, and direct-to-consumer care delivery platforms in the region,” said Natasha Gulati, Industry Manager, Transformational Health, Frost & Sullivan.

“Meanwhile new approaches to health and wellness, like “omics” based health advisory and gamification are gaining market momentum,” she added.

Gulati recommends players focus on personalization, combined with consumer empowerment, as a key ingredient for disease prevention and patient wellness. Innovative companies active in this space include Prudential, iCarbonX, and Healthi who are moving toward personalized wellness intervention through the introduction of direct-to-consumer gene sequencing and Thorne Research and Imagene Labs who are about to make available personalized over-the counter nutritional supplements and skin care products on a subscription model.

Six key trends spurring growth opportunities in the APAC healthcare industry include:

• Rise of new payment models, especially those tied to value-based outcomes;
• Fast-tracked innovative therapeutic products, development and penetration of regenerative medicine, biosimilars, and genetics;
• Technology innovation with rapid development in areas like Artificial Intelligence, mHealth, and virtual reality;
• Development of personalization combined with consumer empowerment for prevention and wellness;
• Adoption of wireless real-time monitoring, aided by analytics, as the clinical community aims for further efficiency and outcome-based approaches; and
•     Rapid deployment of cloud solutions to increase IT efficiency in non-clinical departments.

“An important global trend that is currently missing in APAC is the introduction of value-and outcomes-based payment and reimbursement models. Industry suppliers, including IT vendors, medical technology companies and pharmaceuticals, are partnering with public and private payers to introduce outcomes-based reimbursement models for expensive therapeutic products and services in other parts of the world,” noted Gulati.

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