Adrienne Rivlin unpacks the three trends driving the consumer health sector. Watch her to learn how self-care is containing costs and increasing capacity, vitamin supplements and digital therapeutics are helping to improve mental wellbeing and convenience culture is radically altering the way we access and interact with healthcare.
Read a transcript of the video below:
My name is Adrienne Rivlin, I'm a partner in L.E.K.'s Global Healthcare and Life Sciences Strategy Practice, and I help clients with their most significant commercialization issues. We're seeing three trends that are really instrumental in driving growth in the sector.
The first is self care. This is the concept that where possible we should all strive to look after ourselves. And this is really important for two main reasons. Firstly, to try to contain the cost of delivering care, it's expensive to go and see a doctor. And the second, is because of the capacity constraints on those doctors particularly as we exit the COVID period, we know that our healthcare practitioners, particularly our doctors and nurses are under huge strain at the moment. So where possible, if we're able to manage those conditions ourselves through a trip to the pharmacy, then we really should do so.
A second key trend in the area of consumer health is in mental health and wellbeing. And this is manifesting itself in two different ways. Firstly, an increase in the types of vitamins, minerals, and supplements that are purporting to help improve mental wellbeing. For example, anxiety busting, vitamin supplements. Secondly, in the types of services that are also helping to improve mental wellness and wellbeing. And this is particularly visible in the area of digital therapeutics. So you've probably all seen the types of apps like Headspace that are helpful for meditation or apps that helped you to sleep better. There are also a whole range of different apps that help to track mental wellbeing. And this is useful, particularly as we go into the winter period.
Our third trend is convenience. Consumers have come to expect same levels of convenience in their consumer health care needs as they have in all other aspects of their lives. Indeed the COVID period has just shown us what is possible. So from being able to access our online primary care physician appointments, physiotherapy appointments online, and indeed picking up prescriptions electronically and having them delivered to your home, all of these things are possible digitally and in most cases in a more convenient way than is traditionally been the case. Another area that has had a proof of principle demonstrated through COVID is in the area of home diagnostics. I suppose we've all had experience now of taking tests at home. So we know that it's possible. It's also increasingly been proven to be safe and effective. And I expect that trend to continue as we go into 2022.
In consumer health, some of the most interesting projects that we've worked on over the last 12 months have been those where we have brought to bear some of the most innovative areas of consumer thinking into the healthcare space. I think one of the things that makes L.E.K unique in this area is our ability to understand and analyze complicated market trends and dynamics, and then translate those into areas of commercial advantage for our clients.
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