Providers that treat digital healthcare as a strategic imperative—and integrate their acquisitions accordingly—stand the strongest chance of success in a challenging market.
As COVID-19 made clear, the future of health care delivery is digital—from telemedicine to remote patient monitoring, to home-based testing. Going forward, patient-first technology will be key to generating the growth that can help make deals pay off at today’s heady multiples.
Providers must now rethink the traditional approach to integrating IT post-merger. Traditionally, providers seek cost synergies by integrating core back-office systems, rather than focusing on IT’s potential to drive growth.
That’s the opposite of what’s needed now. Based on our experience with providers, integration that takes a patient-forward digital approach will generate superior economic value vs. pure cost-cutting. Our goal in this paper is to inform C-suite leaders at healthcare providers how the patient-forward approach works and what it can accomplish, including:
- Integration of patient-facing digital systems contributes to top-line growth, creating immediate value that can be used to fund additional integration efforts.
- Digital health integration improves patients’ relationships with the newly combined healthcare entity, which increases patient “stickiness” and lifetime value.
- Finally, digital health integration postpones the massive capital investment and organizational distraction associated with core system consolidation—and allows these activities to be approached more thoughtfully if and when they do occur.
