Michael Jackson has over 15 years of experience helping organizations grow new markets as the general manager of Intel's Consumer Health division. A perfect storm of factors is fueling significant growth in the consumer health segment, including payment reform prioritizing outcomes over services, increased consumer empowerment and engagement, and demand in emerging markets. However, realizing the full potential of consumer health faces challenges regarding stakeholder alignment, balancing data privacy and interoperability, and ensuring inclusion of providers and underserved groups.

1. M
ICHAEL JACKSON is a thought leader with more
than 15 years’ experience helping organizations
effectively penetrate and grow new markets.
As general manager, Consumer Health at Intel
Corporation, Jackson leverages an extensive background
in health economics and business strategy to provide
executive leadership for Intel’s growth and P&L in
consumer healthcare markets worldwide.
Q: What is fueling the promise of
growth in the consumer health
segment?
A: A perfect storm of market con-
ditions is forming that will likely
propel consumer health near the
top of many enterprise priority lists
and justify its estimated 40 percent
CAGR in 2015.
One of the most important condi-
tions is payment reform. As the basis
for reimbursement shifts away from
fee-for-service and toward quality-
based outcomes in the U.S., providers
will extend the continuum of care far
beyond their hospitals to more accu-
rately quantify value after discharge.
One of the best ways to optimize
care and demonstrate effectiveness
is to implement a holistic approach
for understanding a person’s status
by deriving actionable data about
her individually and continuously
from multiple sources – including
consumer devices.
Consumer empowerment is also
going to play a large role. It began
with the shift from a business model
that was traditionally B2B to one
that was more B2C as commercial
health insurers positioned them-
selves to personally engage millions
of newly eligible customers. Now,
consumer health solutions enable all
payer organizations– private, pub-
lic, employer – to promote healthy
behaviors and timely preventative
care that has been shown to reduce
the occurrence of costly acute emer-
gencies. Ultimately, consumers will
have the ability to be more active in
managing their own care, with the
expectation of access to more of
their health information anytime.
In addition, many fast-growing
emerging global markets, like China
and India, are exhibiting strong
appetites for consumer health
solutions that can add value while
supplementing recent government
efforts to provide more efficient vir-
tual care to their significant aging
and rural populations. As more
technology vendors from the region
offer innovative products at very
competitive price points, access
and adoption will continue to climb
at a healthy pace, contributing to
notable growth of the consumer
health market segment regionally
and worldwide.
Q: What are some challenges to real-
izing these game-changing goals?
A: One of the biggest hurdles to
overcome is alignment of priorities
for all major stakeholders. You need
a consumer-centered design, an
evaluation of clinical workflow inte-
gration and a way to measure the
business impact of the goals. How
realistic are they?
There is also a balance that has
to be addressed. When converging,
processing and analyzing so much
data there’s a real threat to privacy.
Some people spend their days try-
ing to breach your protocols to get
at your data. Despite the privacy
threat, interoperability remains the
name of the game. Providers, pay-
ers and even consumers demand
interoperability between networks
where content must always remain
secure. These concerns aren’t new
and have existed within healthcare
for decades. However, an emerg-
ing ecosystem, enabled by a range
of new technologies, opens up new
avenues for interoperability and big
data, while beckoning nefarious
hackers and others who want access
to this information.
Another basic but often over-
looked challenge facing consumer
health is inclusion. These programs
can’t simply be cooked up in a lab
between engineers and marketing
departments to be deployed in the
real world. Providers must be includ-
ed from the get-go because they are
often the ones who will be expected
to make sense of the actionable out-
puts from these solutions.
It’s also critical to include under-
served populations. Consumer health
can offer countless benefits, particu-
larly for those who are most vulnera-
ble, by building relationships beyond
hospitals and traditional healthcare
models, where costs can make pre-
ventative and chronic-disease visits
too burdensome.
Q: What’s next as this market
evolves?
A: I think closed loop feedback is
on the near horizon. As technology
matures and capabilities expand,
an open consumer-based ecosys-
tem will emerge that allows for per-
sonalized multimedia content from
trusted third parties to be delivered
to the same devices, regardless of
footprint, that initially captured the
user’s health data.
Additionally, more meaningful
social integrations will likely develop
as consumers and caregivers share
validated information about pro-
viders, payers and their own care
experiences.
Population health management
will also play a role in this market
as it matures. As more and more
data is created, consumer health
metrics will be naturally gathered
and analyzed, giving unique access
to emerging trends. All of this will
open up the opportunity to impact
population health on a macro level.
Overcoming challenges
facing consumer health
Enabling experiences can bring segment to fruition
About us: With the best partner network in the world, Intel leads the industry to deliver better experiences for
patients and those who care for them - across the spectrum of care.
Stay tuned for a series of announcements that demonstrate our commitment to shaping the future of Consumer Health
experiences with advancements designed from the core to "make it personal".
For more information, please visit www.intel.com/healthcare
Michael Jackson
A demographic shift is also fuel-
ing this growth. Everyday 10,000
baby boomers celebrate their sixty-
fifth birthday in the U.S., and that
trend will continue until at least
2019. Unfortunately, 90 percent of
them, with help from their family
caregivers in some cases, are man-
aging at least one chronic medical
condition (860 million people world-
wide). As telehealth becomes more
widely adopted (and reimbursed),
remote doctor consultations will
increasingly rely on consumer health
technologies to improve chronic
disease management and ease the
stress on a limited pool of primary
care physicians.