To gain advantage, IT leaders should turn competitors into collaborators

A new landscape

For the companies involved specifically to healthcare, though, this new tech-driven strategy involves much more than a change in processes or services — it profoundly changes the competitive landscape. Suddenly healthcare providers, much like their media counterparts, find themselves competing not just with their familiar fellow providers but with major technology companies, which are now in the digital health space, such as Amazon and Apple.

So healthcare companies are now faced with having to get to grips with a new industry, new business models, and potentially new threats to their emerging business. It also means they have to consider talent in a new way and ask if they have to hire engineering talent in order to deliver a service that can compete with a tech-native company. Plus, there’s the question of how to quickly build up the institutional tech knowledge needed to keep innovating. The context of this, of course, is an industry dealing with its own chronic talent shortages.

Rethinking competitors as partners

Faced with these sorts of demands, companies might prematurely abandon a promising area. The key to a more considered approach and a better strategy is to stop thinking about these companies as competitors and start thinking about them as potential partners.

Healthcare providers have the sort of deep industry and medical knowledge that technology companies may lack. Together, healthcare and technology companies are in a stronger position to create new, valuable partnerships that could be greater than the sum of their parts. Healthcare companies have ample opportunities to create go-to-market opportunities with technology companies by viewing technology companies not as vendors, but partners that share in the risks, rewards, and IP.

There are numerous examples of this in action. Healthcare organizations such as Mayo Clinic are running accelerator programs with assistance from tech giants like Google and Epic to bring companies to market faster; virtual care company Hims & Hers is collaborating across in-person care via partnerships with Hartford HealthCare, Mount Sinai Health System, and Privia Health, among others; and new partnerships are emerging all the time across the industry. Care in the community, R&D, new mental-health services, genetics, and biopharmaceuticals — pick any area of healthcare and you’ll find strategic digital health partnerships responding with new services and offers.

Across these types of partnerships, we can trace a few core considerations for companies, regardless of industry, to form a solid basis to develop a new tech-driven growth strategy: