Healthcare in Thoughts from the Centre
Deloitte Tech Trends 2025: A life sciences & healthcare perspective
By Emily May, Manager, and Karen Taylor Director, Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions
Deloitte’s 16th flagship technology report, Tech Trends 2025, paints a future where AI isn't just a tool, but an invisible engine that makes everything work smarter, faster, and more intuitively, ‘like magic, but grounded in algorithms’. It equates the ubiquitous nature of AI, to electricity or the internet, predicting that AI will become fundamentally woven into the fabric of our lives, so that we stop noticing it. Our colleagues working across the life sciences and healthcare (LSHC) industry are seeing first-hand the industry’s rapid evolution, driven by technological advancements that are reshaping how companies research, develop, and deliver treatments and devices for healthcare professionals, organisations and patients. They have therefore developed a LSHC perspective of the Tech Trends 2025 report, Navigating the Future of Technology in Life Sciences and Healthcare examining how technology is being implemented and the implications for the LSHC industry. This blog explores these LSHC trends.
Be brave, be bold: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation
By Emily May, Manager, and Ditto Antony, Analyst, Centre for Health Solutions
Since 2010, our Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation report series has analysed biopharma R&D productivity. Our first report focused on the potential return on investment for 12 large-cap biopharma companies based on their late-stage pipelines. Over time, our cohort has expanded and, since 2020, has encompassed the top 20 companies by 2020 R&D spend. This week, we released the 15th edition of this series titled Be bold, be brave, which reveals a notable increase in the internal rate of return (IRR) to 5.9 per cent for 2024, continuing the upward trend from 4.3 per cent in the previous year. Our report provides unique insights into the critical drivers of this performance. This week’s blog highlights insights from our analysis, the key trends shaping the productivity and efficiency of biopharma R&D, and the bold actions needed to sustain and improve performance.
What is being done to help keep women, and their hearts, healthy?
By Heather Nelson managing director of Life Sciences and Health Care, and Sheryl Jacobson, US Consulting Medtech Practice leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP
According to research funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), women who have a heart attack receive poorer treatment than men at every stage, diagnosis, treatment and aftercare. Furthermore, such inequalities are rife in many other areas of heart and circulatory disease.1 The British Heart foundation advises that ending these inequalities starts with tackling the misconception that coronary heart disease and heart attack is a man’s disease, so more women take action to understand their risk and recognise the symptoms of a heart attack.2 This week’s blog, first published as a Center for Health Solutions Health Forward blog, features an interviews with Nina Goodheart, president of the Structural Heart and Aortic Operating Unit at Medtronic, exploring the inequities in heart disease and how the gender-agnostic approach to cardiovascular medicine might be changing.
Health innovators look to align with incumbents at CES 2025
By Neal Batra, principal, and Andy Davis, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
We recently published our Life Sciences and Healthcare Predictions 2030, with the first in the series predicting that by 2030, Consumers are the CEOs of their own health. This prediction explores the rise of the empowered consumer – individuals becoming more informed about their health, proactively engaging in preventative measures, and being active participants in decisions related to their care. This shift towards a more empowered consumer has been underway for some time in the US, outpacing the UK and many other developed countries in its evolution. In this blog, which first appeared as a US Center for Health Solutions Health Forward blog, our US colleagues provide insights into the trends and advancements driving this transformation. In sharing their insights we can get a glimpse of the direction of travel that greater patient engagement and empowerment could mean for the UK.
International Women’s Day: Accelerating progress in improving women’s health in England
By Marcia Costa, Manager, and Karen Taylor, Director, Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions
In 2022, the then Conservative government published the first Women’s Health Strategy for England acknowledging that women have been underdiagnosed, undertreated, and underserved in healthcare, with systems designed ‘for men by men’. This 10-year Strategy, was aimed at tackling the gender health gap, and set out ‘bold ambitions to tackle deep-rooted, systemic issues within the health and care system, improve the health and wellbeing of women, and reset how the health and care system listens to women’.i In commemoration of this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8th March 2025 and its campaign #AccelerateActionii, our blog explores progress in reducing gender health inequalities and current position on prioritising women’s health.
Health in Europe: Building a citizen-centric, data-driven ecosystem
By Marcia Costa, Manager, and Emily May, Manager, Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions
In 2023, our ‘Future of Health in Europe’ report found wide variations in health outcomes both within and between European countries, alongside substantial variations in healthcare funding and the range of healthcare services offered, and identified the actions needed to create more equitable, sustainable and resilient healthcare systems. On 25th February 2025, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published Keeping health high on the agenda: the European Health Report 2024, a flagship publication providing a comprehensive analysis of achievements against the indicators identified in the measurement framework for the WHO European Programme of Work 2020-25 – ‘United for Better Health’. The report covering 53 member states, also identifies priority areas for action and further improvement.1 While the report acknowledges that some progress has been made, it concludes that people’s health across the region is largely stagnating or even backsliding on a range of indicators from child and adolescent health to chronic diseases.2 In this blog, we explore how our vision of the Future of Health (FoH) could help countries achieve WHO’s policy recommendations.
The Winter 2024 Edition of Deloitte’s London Office Crane Survey: Why London’s LSHC super cluster is driving the emerging optimism
By Karen Taylor, Director, Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions and Rosie Haigh, Manager, UK Real Estate Insights Lead
Deloitte’s Real Estate Regional Crane Surveys examine external influences and key market drivers of city centre construction, highlighting the link between development and prosperity. The London Office Crane Survey Winter 2024 which collected data from April to September 2024 recorded 3.7 million sq. ft. of new starts across 29 office schemes. While these results indicated a decline in commercial activity overall, the results were boosted by life science developments. Given the Centre’s research focus on life sciences and healthcare, we explored the factors driving this boom in investment in London’s life sciences estate. Our blog this week shares our insights on the factors making London an increasingly popular destination of choice for life sciences companies and how this tallies with the survey teams emerging optimism.
World Cancer Day campaign: United for unique
By Márcia Costa, Manager, Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions
Since 2000, World Cancer Day (WCD), organised by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), has been celebrated every year on 4th February to raise awareness and encourage global action in the fight against cancer. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Charter of Paris Against Cancer at the World Summit Against Cancer for the New Millenium and the launch of a new 3-year campaign, ‘United by unique’. This campaign is a reminder of the collective commitment against cancer and calls for a systemic shift towards an equitable, compassionate and people-centred approach that acknowledges that every patient’s experience is unique.i,ii This week’s blog reflects on the current global burden of cancer and explores how a people-centred approach can reduce the wider impact of cancer on patients’ and their loves ones’ lives, wherever they live in the world.
Could GLP-1s help create a gateway to the Future of Health?
By Asif Dhar, Global Life Sciences and Health Care Consulting Services Industry Leader, and Jay Bhatt, Managing Director of the Deloitte Health Equity Institute and the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions
Initially approved for type 2 diabetes treatment, GLP-1s (glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists) have emerged as game-changers in the treatment and management of obesity. GLP-1s are also showing early promise as a treatment for addiction, sleep apnoea, neurological, psychiatric, cardiovascular and kidney diseases. This could help move us closer to Deloitte’s vision for The Future of Health,TM which predicts a monumental pivot from sick-care to well-care, early detection, and prevention. This week’s blog, which first appeared as a Center for Health Solution’s Health Forward blog, explores the emergence of GLP-1s as a potential catalyst for a more preventative health ecosystem, examining the weight loss market’s, potential to support patients in their weight loss journey and what improvements are needed to counteract the side-effects of these drugs.
Realising AI’s potential in the NHS: Is the NHS clear what problems it’s trying to solve?
By Karen Taylor, Director, Centre for Health Solutions
There is understandably an ever-increasing focus on the potential of AI to transform NHS services, with a heightened expectation of its potential to boost productivity but also to improve the quality of patient care and relieve staff from burdensome administrative tasks. This expectation is not only vested in more advanced technologies like GenAI, but also in proven technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML). Our first blog of 2025, NHS productivity: what is the current situation and how might the new NHS plan tackle this? noted that commercial digital and AI solutions are expected to drive productivity improvements. This week’s blog considers the conditions necessary to optimise the potential of AI solutions and the importance of being clear what problem the NHS wants AI to solve?