The healthcare sector continues to grow at a rate faster than GDP. However, increasing complexity throughout the sector has created significant challenges to maintaining growth. The roller coaster of ongoing demands for innovation, coupled with increasing price pressure, continues to pick up speed.

Healthcare will be shaped for the foreseeable future by fundamental changes in six categories:

• Demand for healthcare services is rising rapidly, spurring cost-containment moves by payers and governmental agencies. This will only increase in the face of an aging global population, an upsurge in chronic diseases and increasingly expensive therapies.
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• The traditional big pharma model is in decline, as the pipeline for traditional small-molecule drugs slows. One result: a rise in high-growth businesses based on both generics and medical devices, along with a convergence of treatments administered by a combination of drugs and devices.
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• Clinical outcomes, not improvements, are becoming the standard of value. Driven by payers and employers wanting better results for their money, as well as governmental programs based on generic treatment categories, the trend is toward more effective disease-management programs.
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• Biopharmaceutical companies are challenging traditional pharma, creating a number of high-margin sub-sectors in biotherapeutics. Providers of these protein-based treatments have targeted such expanding sectors as respiratory diseases and diabetes.
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• Global markets have emerged in services, including the outsourcing of strategic functions to contract research organizations and contract manufacturers.
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• The managed health care battlefield between doctors focused on quality and payers focused on cost has expanded to include the highly activist consumer involved in decisions around treatment and coverage. The Internet enables increased involvement in decision making for consumers and increases the price pressures felt throughout the sector.

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