Pharma cos need to become patient-centric: E&Y

With chronic diseases now accounting for three quarters of all health care spending in developed countries, life sciences companies will face increasing pressure to demonstrate that they are helping patients adopt healthier behavior and manage their diseases more effectively.

Pharma and healthcare companies will be required to fundamentally reinvent their business models to make them more patient-centric and better able to drive behavioral changes in consumers, according to Ernst & Young's latest annual report "Progressions 2012 - The third place: health care everywhere".

E&Y said that with an increasing chronic disease burden and poor health indicators in India, there is a pressing need to influence patient behaviors to improve health outcomes.

Today, India is the world's diabetes capital with 61.3 million diabetics in 2011 and projected to reach 101.2 million by 2030, Coronary Heart disease prevalence is projected to increase from 36 million patients in 2005 to 62 million by 2015.

The new imperative for life sciences companies to better understand patient behavior and influence positive changes is being accelerated by two key trends, it said.

Given that India is amongst the world's fastest-growing "internet nations," with more than 100 million internet subscribers and a smartphone market to cross 80 million units per year by 2015, this would be an important enabler to improve accessibility of healthcare to a large population in the country thereby making healthcare ubiquitous.

Hitesh Sharma, Partner & National Leader - Life Sciences, Ernst & Young said, "Almost every life sciences company, regardless of their product or offering, will soon be expected to help change behaviors and deliver better health outcomes."

In the India context, while technology based patient behavior would yield good results for companies investing in these areas, it could also be interesting to see if a Public Private Partnership (PPP) model would be considered by the government to enable reach to the large Below Poverty Line (BPL) population from an educational/ prevention perspective using behavioral analytics, Sharma said.