Getting healthcare no longer means “going to a place “—increasingly, it’s a platform you interact with. Platforms are the way to enable companies to observe, interact with and provide value to consumers as they engage with the organization. From virtual-first care to AI-powered diagnostics, platforms are transforming how patients engage, how providers deliver and how systems create value. Over the past decade, platform-based health startups have generated 2.6x the returns of pure healthcare SaaS businesses (Summit Health) because they know success is about the interactive business system, not just the IT. 
 
Prophet has conducted extensive research on how to build a platform business model to unlock uncommon growth. Our findings are outlined in the book “Winning Through Platforms: How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One”, which breaks down 24 platform plays to transform and grow your business. 
 
We see health systems facing urgent demands to invest in platform plays: to serve and connect multiple types of customers (i.e., patients and payors), to measure healthcare usage patterns and to effectively use this data to optimize the customer and end-user experience. Health systems that create this feedback loop will find that successful platforms aren’t just point solutions like MyChart; they’re complete business systems that attract diverse users and continuously optimize care. 

Platforms are Already Changing the Game 

Digital-First Platforms Are Reshaping Expectations and Outcomes 

Patients expect to manage their health like their finances or travel: digitally, intuitively and on their terms. In the past decade, the share of patients who accessed their digital medical record or patient portal has seen a sharp increase from 25% in 2014 to 65% in 2024. Health systems that meet these expectations are already seeing returns. One Medical, for example, has demonstrated that ongoing patient engagement through its app results in fewer ER visits, simplified same-day booking and a three-fold increase in digital encounters. More generally, according to Panda Health, nearly two-thirds of health system leaders report their investments in digital health solutions have met or exceeded ROI expectations. 

Data Is the New Medicine 

Remote patient monitoring (RPM), AI and smart devices are generating vast amounts of data and using it to anticipate readmissions, optimize triage and personalize interventions. Powered by Biofourmis’ AI-guided RPM, one health system cut 30-day readmissions by 70% and slashed care costs by 38%,a clear signal that data can improve outcomes. 

All predictive systems come with biases and limitations. However, at their best, these systems streamline routine care so clinicians can focus on atypical cases. In turn, these edge cases present an opportunity to help retrain models, refine classifications and ultimately make care more inclusive. The result? A shift from reactive responses to proactive, personalized care that works better for everyone. 

Insurers Are Becoming Platforms and Setting the Rules 

UnitedHealth Group, Cigna and CVS/Aetna are becoming vertically integrated payors and providers. United’s Optum, for example, has acquired hundreds of clinics and physician groups, positioning itself to own every part of the patient experience, from insurance to diagnosis to treatment. They own the data, the clinics and the billing systems creating closed-loop platforms that manage risk and deliver care. These models are driving better coordination and incentivizing lower costs, with 24.5% of U.S. payments now tied to two-sided risk contracts. 

Health Systems Have Unique Platform Advantages 

While startups and behemoths have moved quickly to establish a platform advantage, they haven’t fully realized the value platforms can provide. That’s because most solutions remain fragmented. For example, virtual care programs often succeed only when properly scaled across populations, conditions and with enough utilization. Without patient engagement and trust at scale, impact is limited. 

Health systems have the breadth and reach to change this. They already own the patient journey, physical infrastructure and care delivery staff. They can integrate platforms more thoroughly than competitors, turning isolated solutions into a cohesive experience that builds trust between patients and their providers. 

Platforms Extend Physical Infrastructure 

As care delivery expands across outpatient clinics, urgent care centers, ambulatory surgery sites and newly acquired hospitals, digital platforms are becoming the connective tissue that makes these assets work together efficiently, intelligently and at scale. 

Platforms Expand Revenue Opportunities 

Digital platforms open new pathways for revenue generation, especially in areas that traditional infrastructure can’t reach. By offering services like chronic condition management, behavioral health support and preventive care through virtual channels, health systems can tap into new markets and patient segments. 

Platforms Guide Smarter Investment 

Platform-generated data helps health systems make more informed decisions about where and how to invest. By analyzing patient engagement, service utilization and care outcomes across digital and physical touchpoints, systems can identify gaps and forecast demand. This intelligence enables leaders to optimize both digital and physical assets, ensuring that new clinics, services and technologies are deployed where they have the greatest impact. 
 
So what? Established health systems don’t need to become disruptors, but they do need to learn from them. The challenge is to evolve while staying true to their mission, assets and community relationships. That means integrating digital platforms not as standalone tools, but as strategic enablers of their broader business. 

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It has never been more critical to get post-M&A value creation right. With markets in a state of protracted uncertainty, businesses are more cautious about deploying capital and less patient for concrete returns. M&A activity continues in the pursuit of both revenue and margin growth, but only the most focused operators can achieve each deal’s potential on short timelines and tight budgets. 

We consistently see companies leave value on the table: they fail to reach their goal for value realization, don’t reach it in time, or back away and hedge due to a lack of confidence in the investment thesis. In the end, closing these gaps falls to the business leaders tasked with running the post-deal entity. Here are three key strategies to close those gaps. 

Conversations with business leaders involved in post-M&A activities revealed three crucial yet often overlooked factors—referred to as executional gaps—that executives must address to successfully achieve the value of the deal. 

1. Leaving customer-facing leaders out of the loop 
2. Deals with no value story 
3. Rigid talent models that erode people value (talent and culture) 

For practical and legal reasons, deal teams typically operate with secrecy. This leads to scrambling across the organization when a deal nears announcement. Marketing, communications, and talent teams often become disconnected, resulting in lackluster strategies. This inefficiency puts a time lag on customer-facing decisions and can result in the wrong decisions being made. Brand changes, go-to-market portfolio construction, talent integration plans, and other high-level decisions end up being led by an isolated deal team rather than in partnership with the organization’s functional experts. 

One M&A leader at a large healthcare company said: “Customer value isn’t realized until much later on because it isn’t planned for. [You are already] considering customer [downside risk] in the deal valuation, [why can’t the upside potential] be considered and planned for as well?”    

Recommendation: It’s unnecessary to complicate the M&A process by adding members to the team during due diligence. Instead, build a new step or action within the playbook to pulse out information from the core deal team directly to operating teams when moving toward close. This will help line leaders immerse themselves in the deal thesis and adopt accountability earlier in the process.

Just because deal teams and capital committees understand the value creation thesis; it doesn’t mean that the deal has a value story. Ultimately every audience affected by the deal will need to know how this deal is adding value for them. Yet, internal and external stakeholders often receive very different versions of the story, if they hear anything at all. These fragmented stories don’t always connect, functioning like “point solutions” that speak to the short-term implications for a specific team, rather than amplifying the impact of the deal through a consistent, cohesive narrative that flexes across audiences and still ties back to a single core idea. 

One M&A leader underscored that “the deal story aligns the organization, and it gives them the fuel to change, doing the hard work to realize the value at the core of the deal premise.” This reflects what we’ve seen in market with acquisitions like Danaher’s acquisition of GE Lifesciences. Danaher had a unified plan and story for the acquisition, clearly creating a cohesive message that flows through each key audience. Danaher understood how the entire GE asset – from technology and product portfolio to customer relationships and brand equity – would combine into a powerful new life sciences operating company well before the deal’s close. That plan was then echoed to leaders across the company and into the marketplace. In the end, that cohesive story powered a new operating company, Cytiva, which was central to Danaher’s 110% share performance in the two years following the close of the deal.

Recommendation: Identify an expert, usually from the marketing, brand or communications team, to develop a story of value with the help of a cross-functional team communicating to different audiences. Marketing might personalize the core story for customers while investor relations might develop messaging aligned to what investors are looking for. The communications team might tweak the message for partners and Human Resources might build a North Star narrative for employees. While each message might be slightly customized for the intended audience, each must ladder up to an overarching message to drive alignment and spark value creation. 

While it’s critical to capture value by addressing internal synergies post-close, it’s also important to de-risk the integration plan by recognizing the unique cultural and talent contributions the acquired team brings. The asset likely carries new capabilities, usually with hard-to-hire skill sets which must be thoughtfully redeployed in the post-close entity. Moreover, if it was a successful operation before being acquired, it would have been fueled by a unique culture that needs to be acknowledged, and potentially leveraged as a touchstone for renewal or transformation.  

Several M&A leaders echoed this perspective saying, “If the primary driver of value is something tangible, the culture is overlooked because it is hard to value,” “If you force rigidity on a company, that drives culture mismatch, and it skips over the secondary value question of if the talent and culture could improve your own,” and “If you say ‘hey we love your asset,’ you need to consider the culture and people that created that asset, or you have blinders to the full value of it.” They also spoke to the importance of HR leaning in, as their insights can be critical to understanding what employment shifts will resonate within a company.

Recommendation: Build an employee ignition module into the playbook to build a human-centric strategy for retaining and activating the talent and cultural assets acquired in the deal.

Tech companies have adopted this approach; recognizing the significant value of the talent assets they are acquiring. Apple maintains an acquisition pipeline primarily looking for top talent from the acquired business or redeploy throughout their earn-out tenure. Apple views the acquired talent as a flexible, scalable asset to be used to drive growth well beyond the specific team or company in which they entered the firm. This flexibility not only lowers talent acquisition costs but also serves as a new “Talent Model” lever for value creation, speeding up value realization by applying the strongest talent to the most critical tasks. 

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Investing in both innovation and organizational resilience are two essential elements of success for companies to compete in today’s rapidly changing world. Through interviews with 14 senior executives and surveying 300+ innovation experts across the globe, Prophet’s latest research explores how successful organizations use innovation to drive business resilience.  

Four Learnings for Companies in China to Build Innovative Organizations 

Our findings reveal that innovative companies are more likely to be resilient. Particularly, 60% of respondents in China agree that innovation and resilience are connected, more so than their counterparts in Singapore (48%), the U.S. (47%) and the UK (47%). However, there exists a strong tension between the two characteristics – while Chinese companies on average deploy more innovation tactics compared to companies globally, they also face more pronounced barriers. In this article, we share our key findings and explore implications for Chinese businesses seeking to drive sustainable growth through innovation. 

1. Prioritize Cross-Functional Alignment 

Incubation programs and pod-like team structures have long proven to be effective innovation tactics and are widely adopted by companies in China. According to our research, 35% of Chinese respondents report that their companies have a formal innovation incubation program compared to 21% of respondents globally. Additionally, 27% of Chinese respondents report their companies use pod-like team structures vs. just 18% of respondents globally. However, such team structures risk becoming siloed. A lack of cross-functional alignment remains a significant barrier to innovation and growth, with 44% of Chinese respondents citing it as a challenge compared to only 32% globally. 

One example of how cross-functional alignment can impact innovation comes from the fast-growing beverage brand Chi Forest. As a startup, the company found tremendous success through operational agility, running pod-like teams with product managers in each team leading individual innovation initiatives. However, as Chi Forest grew, organizational inefficiencies emerged due to a lack of streamlined workflows and cross-functional collaboration, causing an overlap of roles and processes. Chi Forest has embarked on an organization-wide transformation agenda to reimagine its operation and business model.  

Takeaway: It is important to implement innovation incubation programs and pod-like team structures, while also emphasizing cross-functional alignment. 

2. Develop Balanced Innovation Incentive Structures 

Incentives are a crucial part of driving innovation, but overly focusing on short-term financial outcomes can hinder success. Our findings show that 56% of Chinese respondents report their companies to have special incentive structures for new business opportunities compared to 30% globally. Yet this has also led to an innovation barrier, where 54% of Chinese respondents say their companies have too much emphasis on short-term financial results compared to 35% globally. 

To empower long-term growth for the company, innovation success should be measured against various objectives beyond financial ROI. For example, Xiaomi has a series of incentive programs to encourage innovation, including an Annual Technology Award that rewards $1 million to an internal engineering project every year, evaluating technology and engineering excellence as well as business impact. The 2022 winner, Xiaomi’s CyberDog team, impressed CEO Lei Jun because the project successfully integrated many of the group’s R&D results and presented new technologies that could be soon applied to other core products. This is a good example of how incentives can be used effectively to drive impactful innovation.  

On the other hand, companies like Pop Mart are facing growing pains. Although the company offers generous incentives, it measures innovation success solely on the creation of new product lines and their short-term sales volumes. As a result, the toy maker is left with a bloated portfolio and hasn’t been able to elevate its brand equity despite years of exponential growth. 

Takeaway: To avoid pitfalls, organizations must develop incentive structures to recognize results, while avoiding overly focusing on short-term financial outcomes. 

3. Guide Rapid Innovation Cycles with Long-Term Vision 

Rapid prototyping and iteration is a common innovation tactic, but past innovation failures and a lack of long-term planning processes can discourage innovation. Our findings show that 31% of respondents in China say their companies use rapid prototyping and iteration compared to just 19% of respondents globally. However, failed past attempts at innovation have limited commitment to future innovation for 40% of Chinese companies compared to 28% globally. Additionally, 40% of Chinese respondents say their companies lack a long-term planning process compared to 38% globally. 

Shiseido’s approach to innovation is a great example of how companies can balance a strong brand vision and rapid innovation cycles. “Shiseido’s ability to have lasting success is in large part due to our dedication to creating the best quality products to meet consumer needs. This dedication to ‘craftsmanship’ is why we don’t blindly follow market trends but rather think critically about how we can further refine our products,” said Carol Zhou, SVP of China Business Innovations & Investments at Shiseido, in an interview with Prophet, “Although we may not always be at the forefront of trends, we have found the right pace to create a timeless brand.”  

Takeaway: Organizations should lead innovations with a clear vision and long-term planning, while enabling rapid prototyping and iteration based on a clear strategic roadmap, to create products that meet both long-term and short-term goals. 

4. Focus on Customer Insights as a Foundation of Innovation 

Creating differentiating innovations and finding emergent subcategories are effective ways to separate yourself from competitors, but paying too much attention to competitors and too little attention to customer needs is a surprisingly common mishap, according to our research. Chinese companies tend to focus heavily on competitor activity, with 40% doing so compared to 29% globally. This is often at the expense of paying attention to the needs of their customers, with 52% of Chinese respondents reporting that a major barrier to innovation for their companies is paying too little attention to customer needs, compared to 37% globally.  

Companies must develop an organizational-wide mindset of diving into customer insights, data analysis, and user testing to identify what customers truly need and want. By doing so, they can create innovative products and services that truly differentiate them from their competitors, making them stand out in the market. Nike has been successful in this regard, with a strong focus on the athlete and understanding their needs driving their innovations. As Mark Parker, CEO of Nike, explains, “Our success has been based on our commitment to innovation and great design, which really in our case starts with our commitment to the athlete – and really understanding the athlete and the insights we get from that relationship. So, we translate those insights into real innovation.” In China, Nike actively deploys a localized digital ecosystem to engage with its customers and understand their needs. In turn, the rich data gathered from these digital platforms continuously fuels its innovation and growth. 

Takeaway: Prioritize a human-centered approach that focuses on customer needs to create truly meaningful innovations. 

Building Innovative Organizations 

Indeed, innovation is not a department, but a collective achievement of an organization, as one innovation leader has told us. Companies should lead with a vision, encourage risk-taking, experimentation, and collaboration across all levels of the organization. This will help to create an environment where innovation can thrive and become ingrained in the company’s DNA. 

What can your company do today to turbocharge innovation? 

1. Emphasize the importance of always-on consumer insights and deploy the right team and structure as enablement. 
2. Ensure a holistic view of the market demand landscape, covering both consumers and competition and strategize growth moves and innovation efforts. 
3. Build a multi-year roadmap with different chapters and cross-functional teams and land the detailed action plan in a short-term/ one-year plan. 
4. Clarify how innovation initiatives drive business purpose, develop employee value propositions and define incentives accordingly. 
5. Transform how your innovation team works within your organization to instill agility and collaboration. 

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Faced with a world of growing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), business resilience is being tested like never before. And, continuing with business as usual becomes the biggest risk.  

Innovations’ power to boost resilience is more important than ever. Yet organizations are barely scratching the surface when it comes to innovation and missing opportunities for meaningful and sustainable revenue growth.  

So, how can business leaders chart a path for their organization to join the high-performing ranks of the truly innovative and resilient? Especially when innovation and resilience are treated like conflicting priorities, with innovation seen as a cost center and resilience as cost-cutting.

We talked to 300 senior global business leaders across 30+ industries to learn how successful organizations use innovation to drive business resilience. And we learned these types of organizations are more likely to practice a wide range of innovation techniques, have C-suite buy-in and strive for sustainable change.  

Organizations that are both innovative and resilient are two times as likely to exceed their financial targets and three times as likely to create shareholder value than their competitors.  

Download our global research report to learn:  

• How the most financially successful organizations use innovation to build business resilience 
• The common barriers that slow innovation in organizations 
• The top techniques used to expand commitment to innovation through the enterprise 
• How to use Prophet’s Human-Centered Transformation Model to become more innovative and resilient 

Frequently Asked Questions

Change is hard, especially in healthcare. But in the sometimes lagging, but always vital industry, transformative change enables real people with real needs to live better lives. Not to mention, change strengthens bottom lines, improves investor returns and supports a more productive and sustainable society. That’s a powerful and synergistic business case to inspire all people that work in healthcare to take on the challenge of driving innovation.  

At face value, becoming a “changemaker,” can be daunting. It requires bravery and a clear sense of direction. This new report, from Prophet’s Healthcare team, was written to empower and guide healthcare’s future changemakers so they can ignite change in the industry and realize their transformation goals.  

Based on interviews with 29 senior leaders in healthcare, extensive market research and decades of experience helping healthcare organizations transform, “Transforming Healthcare: The Changemaker’s Playbook,” provides insights and recommendations to drive necessary change in healthcare.  

Download the report for: 

• Deep dives into four areas ripe for innovation and transformation in healthcare:
  • The rise of connected and empowered consumers
  • The expansion of care outside the hospital
  • The ascendancy of Value-Based Care
  • The decentralization and democratization of data
• Highly relevant commentary and insights from industry leaders across the ecosystem 
• Digestible and achievable “next steps” for leaders seeking to become changemakers