Perspectives

Winning the market shift

Plotting the path forward in life sciences and health care

​From patients to consumers. From volume to value. The ground is shifting under the world’s largest industry—and the players left standing will be the ones that embrace innovation with confidence right now.

For five years, the US life sciences and health care industry has focused on responding to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But alongside ACA, an array of market-based forces has taken shape. They add up to a fundamental change in the basic economic model of the largest industry in the global marketplace—a change that is far from finished.

How we can help

For many health care and life sciences organizations, the stakes are hard to overstate: market share, margin, and even sustained relevance may hang in the balance. Some players may adapt well enough to survive. Some may emerge better-off than before. Industry disruption brings opportunity along with risk, and taking the steps to meet that opportunity is what winning the market shift is all about.

The theme that shows up everywhere in this transformation is the economic model shift from volume to value in the financing and delivery of care. That shift helps drive many changes for industry constituents, including the rise of the patient as informed consumer, the strain of new financial and risk pressures, new integration models among players who used to be separate or even competitive with one another, and the need to adapt new therapeutic advances in several major disease areas.

Simply put, it’s going to be more difficult to drive differentiated profitability in the post-reform era. An aging boomer population, rising incidences of chronic disease, and other factors are driving up the cost of care giving. There’s more demand for available health care dollars, and the entities that finance health care—federal and state governments, employers, and individual consumers— are struggling to keep up.

To find yourself among the winners, it will be critical to set yourself apart from your competition in ways that customers value. That will start with execution on critical areas like financial flexibility and sustainability, individual consumer focus, and transitioning from volume to value—and it will also include making tough strategic choices.

Explore our integrated offerings

As the largest health care consulting firm, Deloitte is in this shift with you. Our desire is to help you win. And our teams are taking the lead on market shift imperatives in a number of critical areas:

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