How Orange aims to grow its healthcare business

Orange is among communications service providers (CSPs) that over the past decade have tried to carve out a role in providing digital health services. But digital transformation has been slow in coming to the healthcare sector, which in turn has hampered the progress of technology providers. Can Enovacom, Orange's healthcare brand, now seize opportunities from the growing need for healthcare data exchange and analysis? Health systems in most OECD countries are yet to undergo digital transformation, according to a recent working paper by the OECD, with the sector lagging behind many other industries. And although the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the benefits of digital healthcare, it also pinpointed problem areas, according to the OECD working paper. In OECD countries “different datasets and services still are not linked electronically, hindering the flow of crucial information – a serious problem … during the COVID-19 pandemic," notes the author. At the same time, the healthcare sector has got off to a slow start in deploying analytics, and telehealth usage remains limited. In addition, many of the challenges to digitalization that the sector faces are human, making them difficult to address. In theory, however, the current lack of digital maturity in healthcare creates opportunities for telcos and other technology players, particularly given society’s hugely increased dependence on remote care during the Covid-19 pandemic. A vertical view In 2018, Orange took a fresh tack to addressing the sector with the acquisition of the healthcare software company, Enovacom and in 2020, Orange Business Services consolidated its healthcare activities within Enovacom. Earlier this year Orange also teamed up with AXA Assurance Maroc to take a majority stake in Dabodoc, a platform designed to digitalize access to healthcare in Africa. As Orange grows its international healthcare ambitions, Christophe Thibault, international sales director of Enovacom explained how Orange is combining Enovacom’s healthcare software and vertical sector specialization with the wider group’s cloud storage, analytics, security and connectivity solutions to address the complex and highly regulated market. “All shareholders need to exchange information about patients,” says Thibault. Enovacom’s software and integration services therefore set out to securely collect and exchange patient data from different systems. “Our job is to facilitate the data exchange [and integration] and to be as neutral as possible, as flexible as possible.” As for Orange, to “have an application layer that can facilitate the collection and exchange of patient data is certainly a USP,” says Thibault. In addition to its healthcare market technology and expertise, Enovacom brings a sector-specific sales team, which is experienced in dealing with healthcare stakeholders, whether it is IT staff in hospitals or healthcare professionals such as nurses or doctors, according to Thibault. At the same time, “when you deal with virtual care … [and] remote patient monitoring, you need connectivity and the cloud and the technical structures,” which is where Orange’s core services step in, with either Orange Business Services or Enovacom leading on sales. “The most important [consideration] is what the customer needs [so we can] bring in the right people with the right level of knowledge. Helping physicians and nurses save time by automatically collecting data from a patient’s monitor is specifically about care, so that is Enovavom, but maybe they need Wi-Fi or other communication services," explains Thibault. In addition, Enovacom has partnered on a managed service with AWS, which provides cloud expertise, says Thibault. Making sense of data One example of Enovacom’s services is its work with a French university hospital to create a clinical data warehouse with anonymized data. “We collect, structure and anonymize all the historical data from patients and make it available in a data lake and develop front end to search any information,” says Thibault. Researchers can be accredited to use the data to securely search for a specific cohort of patients, for example a 20-25 year-old male with certain characteristics, he explains. Certainly there is a lot of patient data to draw on. IDC estimated that approximately 270 GB of healthcare and life science data would be created for every person in the world in 2020. Yet the healthcare sector faces significant challenges when it comes to analyzing data, notably in the form of "hyper heterogeneity of healthcare technology stacks", as well as a lack of standards and interoperability, according to IDC. Nonetheless, healthcare providers and researchers are increasingly seeking to use technology to better analyze and make use of data, according to Thibault. “The volume of data is growing bigger and bigger and from that we can develop some algorithms, some models of predictive medicine or artificial intelligence and that’s really where it is going. More and more hospitals and the wider ecosystem are understanding this and that is why there are more solutions around predictive and artificial intelligence,” explains Thibault. International ambitions Enovacom recently launched a new application called Patient Link, which centralizes a patient’s healthcare data securely in a single application to facilitate administrative formalities and to manage a patient's care pathways. Interoperable, it enables healthcare establishments to securely share patient healthcare data before, during and after their admission or treatment. The service, which relies on Enovacom’s healthcare data warehouse to structure data, is currently available only in France, with an international launch planned in 2022. France remains Enovacom’s principal market, but it also operates in Belgium, Switzerland, the DACH and Nordic countries, the UK and Canada “and now the plan is to create more and synergies with the group in Middle East and Africa," according to Thibault. “The evolution of the market in Africa and … investment in e-health [means it] makes sense for us to explore and bring a stronger proposition.”