Clients often ask us: How does the internet of things (IoT) or smart home technology affect my market and company? Arielle, Annalise, and I worked with a health insurer who asked us that question. That client work led to a new report, “Build A Connected Health Experience With Smart Home Devices.” We started by reviewing how the three core business scenarios for IoT applied to the healthcare industry: 1) Design and manage connected products or places in contact with customers; 2) Operate connected assets — things — to conduct business; and 3) Consume data from third-party connected devices that offer new insights into customer and market behavior.

For healthcare organizations (HCOs), many are already working on IoT for the design of medical equipment or hospitals or even offices. The new areas are smart home technology/products and wearables. For HCOs, the smart home market is a wide variety of exciting, distracting, and interesting opportunities to extend the reach of providers into at-home care and to collect new information from customers and patients about their environment and behavior outside of providers’ offices.

Our report describes the opportunity for healthcare providers and insurers to work much more closely with customers and patients to improve health maintenance, prevention, post-procedure care, and chronic care. Consumers report that they are willing to share data from their personal devices and that they are even more likely to share data if they receive a subsidy on the cost of the device. The end result will be improved care, higher patient satisfaction, better information for caregivers, and lower healthcare costs.

For organizations outside of healthcare, the lesson is to focus on your core customers and stakeholders (enterprise or consumer) and their use of smart, connected products to find ways that you can help them be more successful. By plugging into their use of connected products such as trucks, air compressors, or home weight scales, you can increase customer experience and value in targeted ways.

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Looking to build out a foundation for your connected health experience strategy? See Jeff Becker’s report, “How To Build A Healthcare IoT Platform,” to help lay the groundwork for an IoT strategy.