Tag: Babylon Health

The Coordination Age Companies: The First Release

This is the first report in a series outlining companies that we think are lighting the path on the journey to the Coordination Age. Its goal is to deepen understanding of the Coordination Age and to inspire innovation and engagement in this crucial transition.

What is the Coordination Age?

The Coordination Age is STL Partners’ term for the new economic and technological era that the world is transitioning to. In the Coordination Age, the over-arching need of governments, companies and individuals is to make better use of the available resources to “make the world run better”. This means managing those resources to deliver better outcomes, better experiences, and less waste.

Connected technologies, including 5G, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, automation, Cloud and Edge Computing, are key tools to the efficient use, management and distribution of those resources. Resources include time, money, carbon, goods, water, land, buildings, raw materials, energy, and so on.

Why Coordination?

Managing resources better requires multiple partners to coordinate their actions and processes to deliver outcomes for maximum efficiency and effect. There does not need to be an all powerful, central ‘coordinator’. That is often neither desirable nor possible. Instead, there will be a multitude of interconnected processes and players that achieve coordination on demand to deliver the outcomes needed within the ecosystem overall.

Coordination, transformation and technology

Much of the action of coordination will be automated – processes or parties communicating with another automatically for the sake of speed, cost and efficiency, but the whole system will be under the control of people and organisations as it is now.

The Coordination Age is the master key to the puzzle of digital transformation. While the technologies have implied what is possible, the Coordination Age shows what it is for and why transformation is necessary, and what it will take to make it work in practice in real world ecosystems – the how.

Role of this report

This is the first report in a series outlining companies that we think are lighting the path on the journey to the Coordination Age. Its goal is to deepen understanding of the Coordination Age and to inspire innovation and engagement in this crucial transition.

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The Coordination Age 100: Inspiration for change

We aim to profile 100 companies across a number of industries as inspiration for new business models, how to transform a business to succeed in the Coordination Age; and/or as potential partners for the telecom industry. The Coordination Age is well underway and many companies have been built around driving this step change in our economy, or are transforming themselves to adapt to it. Some telcos have already started on the Coordination Age path as we have looked at this in Are telcos smart enough to make money work?, The roles of 5G & private networks and Can telcos create a compelling smart home?. However, for companies not already on this path, it’s hard to know where to start and what emerging technologies, business models and ecosystems driving that are Coordination Age.

What is a Coordination Age company?

  • A Coordination Age company delivers better use of resources to their customers by combining different technology resources such as connectivity (IoT, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi, etc.)​, cloud/edge computing, AI and machine learning, and automation
  • It operates in a B2B2X environment, bringing together previously siloed data, processes, companies, and customers
  • A Coordination Age company usually operates across physical and digital worlds, but in some cases the resources can be predominantly digital too (e.g. in financial services or entertainment)

Benefits: better use of  / returns on resources

coordination age benefits

Table of content

  • Executive summary
  • Introduction – the Coordination Age and this report
  • What is the “Coordination Age 100”?
    • The Coordination Age 100: Inspiration for change
    • What is a Coordination Age company?
    • Coordination Age natives vs transformers
  • Ten company profiles
  • Coordination Age natives vs transformers
    • Coordination Age natives
      • Octopus Energy
      • Ocado
      • Booking.com
      • Babylon Health
      • Starling Bank
      • Upstart
    • Coordination Age transformers
      • Hitachi Rail
      • Rolls Royce
      • Orange Money/Orange Bank
      • Signify

 

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Telcos in healthcare: Winning in a long game, Babylon, and the impact of 5G

Introduction: telcos in healthcare

This is a summary of some of the learnings from another fascinating session at the TELUS Carrier Health Summit in Toronto, May 22nd 2019. This is an annual gathering that was hosted by TELUS Global Solutions for telcos and their partners in healthcare.

Of the hosts, Fawad Shaikh, VP TELUS Global Solutions, said it ran this years’ session because it wants “to develop an alliance of like-minded telcos in health”. David Thomas, VP TELUS Health Solutions, added that “healthcare has to be delivered locally, which is a real plus for telcos. Yet we all need to gain global scale to compete, so it is a great opportunity for non-competitive collaboration.”

About sixty people from telcos and health tech companies were there this year, and the audience was global, with representatives from Latin America, N America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia.

STL Partners presented its research on nine telco healthcare studies, and caught up with participants, including Dr Ali Parsa, CEO and founder of Babylon Health, and Mairi Johnson, its Global Partnerships Director.

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Healthcare: the problem to be solved

Healthcare is one of our favourite examples of the drive behind the Coordination Age. The explanation is simple:

The problem with healthcare in most economies is not that there isn’t great medicine and healthcare professionals. It’s getting it all delivered to the patients at the right time and at a cost that’s affordable.

This is fundamentally a coordination problem: bringing the right assets (whether physical or digital – a nurse, a treatment, or the patients’ records) together for the patient. Then maintaining the order throughout the patients’ treatment, and indeed, their lives.

All healthcare systems face multiple mounting pressures: growing and ageing populations, greater costs, skills challenges, and more pressure on funding from other sources to name a few.

There’s money in health

It’s also an area of HUGE expenditure. PWC’s Tara McCarville shared figures showing that:

  • Global healthcare spend is forecast to grow from $9.7 Trillion in 2014, to $18 Trillion in 2040, growing at 21% CAGR over the next 5 years.
  • Even so, it’s perhaps surprising that 84% of Fortune 50 companies are engaged in healthcare in some way.

Given this, it’s less surprising to note that the big tech players are seriously engaged in digital health too, with Amazon’s recent tie up with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to create the Haven Group being the most eye-catching. Others between CVS and Aetna, and Sanofi and Click Therapies involve less broadly familiar names, but are weighty nonetheless.

From a government perspective the numbers are big too. In the UK for example, which is one of the EU’s lower healthcare spenders per capita, the NHS’s annual bill is currently £154 billion, and it’s forecast to rise to £188 billion in 15 years (to 2033).

A 5% tax rise?

Without borrowing, this would lead to something like a 5% increase in overall taxation. Over 98% of UK tax funding is from ‘general taxation and national insurance’ – so mainly income tax, VAT and ongoing employment contributions.  In other words, people would have to pay.

Despite the UK’s love of the NHS, a permanent 5% tax rise would draw many concerned breaths from both politicians and the public. The need to find better solutions is genuinely pressing.

(NB Try out this calculator made by the Institute of Fiscal Studies if you fancy yourself as a policy guru. To fund healthcare, would you raise taxes, cut pensions, defence, or education?)

Figure 2: The Institute of Fiscal Studies’ (IFS) Health Budget Calculator

IFS NHS Budget Calculator
Meeting the NHS’s future funding needs would mean a 5% UK tax rise

Source: https://explore.ifs.org.uk/tools/nhs_funding/tool NB At £154bn, the Health spending category is already bigger than all those above.

The rest of the report contains:

  • The road to Babylon – one of the ways ahead?
  • Some telcos are scared by health, others are serious about it
  • 5G, Healthcare – or both?
  • Conclusions: telcos in healthcare – making a long game a good one

And includes the following figures:

  • Figure 1: How to succeed in telco health – key learnings from the Summit
  • Figure 2: The Institute of Fiscal Studies’ (IFS) Health Budget Calculator
  • Figure 3: Babyl has particular strength in Rwanda’s rural areas
  • Figure 4: A flavour of Babylon’s UK online offering
  • Figure 5: Pros and cons of telcos in healthcare
  • Figure 6: Telstra’s National Cervical Cancer Screening programme benefits
  • Figure 7: Telcos face a serious choice in Capex / Opex investments

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