Many assume the only opportunity for a successful healthcare career is to become a healthcare professional, a doctor, nurse, midwife, or GP. Actually, it is far from being accurate and the entrepreneur José Alonso knows it better than anyone else. There are so many areas within healthcare where businesses can thrive, and the future of it would be mostly sculpted around start-ups.
José is an Incubation Manager at Konica Minolta Global R&D, meaning he is responsible for driving the creation of new IT solutions in the healthcare space. Their edge-cutting technologies including unique image expertise and data processing capabilities are widely used and provided to meet and go beyond their clients’ needs. Konica Minolta aims to guide its clients to master the digital era, showing a real desire to be customer centric.
Although the role of José within Konica Minolta has particularly evolved over the years and he currently focuses on stakeholder management and budget allocation, one thing that he pointed out is the constant search of innovation. This motto has proven to be successful as their team grew from 4 to 35 people.
Business opportunities are always changing under environmental influences, that’s why it is crucial to stay updated on the latest trends. To do so, they work closely with national sales organizations to ensure they fully identify and fill the specific gaps in the market. As Konica Minolta is a worldwide company, such collaborations are undergoing on each continent.
Their own teams hold wealthy market research through interviews, questionnaires, shadowing observations, etc. giving a valuable and continuous feedback loop. After identifying the pain points, they collaborate with Konica Minolta labs to include innovative components.
Patients, providers, and payers are the three stakeholders in today’s healthcare, and there should be an invisible dance between those to ensure a win-win situation at all times. One influences directly the others. Hence, it is crucial to think about how solving a pain point for one can affect the two others.
Making sure everything runs smoothly can be quite a challenge as Konica Minolta operates in many countries with very different cultures. Fortunately, promoting communication between the stakeholders is one of José’s team strength. They understand that healthcare providers need their expertise to be more streamline and focused on clinical aspects. Therefore, they are looking at ways to develop solutions and technology that can help reduce their administrative workload. The ultimate goal is to allow providers to spend more quality time with their patients.
COVID-19 outbreak has affected everyone but not only in a negative way. Let’s illustrate this fact with telehealth adoption. This phenomenon did not happen because the technology wasn’t available earlier, on the contrary, it happened due to the impossibility to get on-site consultation: Covid-19 has been the trigger.
According to José’s opinion, the healthcare system could be improved if more value is accorded. For example, the US Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has introduced several incentives programs for the quality that healthcare professionals provide. For now, they incentivize them towards quality, switching from fee-for-service to value based care. This has already been adopted by both patients and providers in many situations showing promising results.
He is really optimistic about the future of healthcare for seeing a lot of start-ups, corporates and even governments working on enabling affordable healthcare access to the general public. To conclude, he says: “We are living in a period of significant technological advancements and many of them, I think, will enhance our quality of life”.
The healthcare space has a lot of potential and José sees a lot of opportunities for his team to further work in that field.
