Future-gazing: The disruptive forces impacting healthcare at work
On January 24, Willis Towers Watson Health & Benefits hosted Future Gazing, where experts and visionaries offered valuable insights into some of the exciting opportunities and disruptive innovations helping to shape the future of employee health and wellbeing.
From genetic testing and the ‘uber-isation’ of health care to Human Centric Health and light diets, we look at the key messages and insights from the expert speakers that took to the stage.
Decentralising and democratising healthcare
“Technological advancements are decentralising and democratising everything – including healthcare”, declared keynote speaker and world-renowned futurist, Matthew Griffin.
“We are on cusp of a new epoch, and it gets faster from here.”
Indeed, healthcare, according to AXA Marketing and Innovation Director Gordon Henderson, “has changed more rapidly in the last two decades, than at any time in the last 2,000 years”.
As technology is enabling people to take greater personal responsibility for their own health, “doctors, physicians and surgeons,” he said, “are taking a back seat”.
Dr Luke James, Bupa UK Medical Director, highlighted the burgeoning cost of hospital outpatient appointments and pointed to a shift away from the traditional healthcare model.
He shone a light on some of the technologies that are at the fore of a healthcare revolution, from patches that can take heart rhythm recordings to glucose monitors that automatically regulate insulin pumps. He also talked of the rapid growth in genetic testing.
“With around 75,000 genetic tests currently on the market,” he said, “we are entering a consumer genetics space that will help to drive important behavioural changes.”
Griffin pointed out that the science behind an extraordinary, unimaginable, future is here and now, with developments in gene editing serums that eradicate inherited conditions and digital avatars that replicate us on a cellular level to memory editing for addictions and progesterone cocktails to help regenerate limbs.
“Few organisations in the world are able to see, let alone comprehend, understand or grasp the furious rate of change that our world is now experiencing, and the deep and broad impacts it has on companies and individuals, but not only do the teams at WTW understand them, they help to drive them and keep their customers at the forefront of the market,” said Griffin.
The fourth industrial revolution: tackling the challenges of turbo-charged innovation
Having had to already adapt to the digital disruption of the third industrial revolution, Phil Hayne, director at Reba, said employers will now be faced with an even faster rate of change.
An explosion of healthcare technology will lead to hyper-personalised, preventative, medicine and increased longevity. This will bring new hurdles to be overcome – from an ageing workforce living with chronic conditions to a widening healthcare gap.
He predicted that this year “we’re going to see a massive increase in company boards driving wellbeing and positive cultures at work”. This, he emphasised, “offers a great opportunity for HR to take a seat at the top table and help drive these agendas.”
As healthcare and the workplace changes, Kevin Newman, Head of Health and Benefits GB at Willis Towers Watson, also challenged employers to consider how their benefits and total reward strategies are designed, financed and delivered to ensure they’re keeping pace.
He explained how employees of the future will engage with their benefits in a very different way to how they have in the past.
“Technology and human intervention combined,” he said, “will have an important role to play in helping employees navigate and get real value from their benefits packages.”
Fostering healthy behaviours and establishing an environment for change
Speaking about the current momentum around mental health, clinical psychologist and CEO of Unmind, Dr Nick Taylor, likened it to jogging, which was alien to the pre-1970s generation but quickly became entrenched in society.
“It is now talked about so often, it is part of our everyday narrative,” he said.
Dr Taylor said businesses are ‘desperate’ to reduce the impact of mental ill-health, with the cost to the UK economy now reaching £37billion a year.
“Digital is essential for prevention,” he said. “It is scalable, affordable, offers personalised care, is available 24/7 in this ever-moving world, and can sign-post other services, lifting the mystery that exists around mental health services.”
Another top workplace health issue that could benefit from a proactive, practical approach is sleep disruption, said Christina Friis Blach Petersen, co-founder of LYS Technologies. Like mental health, sleep deprivation has huge financial implications for businesses, costing the UK economy around £45billion each year. Research has revealed that light is the most influencing factor on the sleep-wake cycle, and the rise of urbanisation is significantly impacting this.
“We really need to understand how we can make indoor environments more human-centric and how we can maintain a healthy day and night cycle,” said Petersen.
In the future, highly-personalised light diets, prescribed following detailed digital tracking and monitoring, could help drive behavioural changes. This harnessing of technology to manage behaviour was a common theme of the TED-style talks, with Vitality director Greg Levine saying technological advances are facilitating a “new wave of the monitored self”.
Encouraging people to be active should be a starting point, said Greg, as exercise not only has a positive impact on the physical being but makes people more likely to adopt other healthy behaviours, such as good diet. Incentivising healthy behaviours gives people the right ‘nudge’ to not only initially participate, but to make significant changes to their activity levels over a prolonged period.
“The key to sustainability is having a pragmatic approach, in terms of how you incentivise, reward and drive that very difficult challenge of human behaviour,” said Levine.
And preventative action is not limited to fitness.
Michael Perlmutter, Health Imagination leader at Willis Towers Watson, said that health risk factors associated with non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, can be controlled and managed through lifestyle intervention. He said there needs to be a move away from expensive, capital-intensive hospital-centric interventions towards a system that relies more on consumers.
He also spoke of the ‘uber-isation’ of healthcare, and how emerging technologies are disrupting and transforming how healthcare is delivered, from ordering GP home visits and digital ‘daily mood checkers’ to ‘triaging’ chatbots.
The user experience is paramount, said Michael, as is having open standards, privacy, and ensuring that systems talk to each other and that the right data gets to the right place at the right time.
“We have to create the eco-system, we have to create the environment that enables these types of pilots to take hold,” he added.
This article is sponsored by Willis Towers Watson.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, WTW
WTW is a leading global advisory, broking and solutions company.
