Health Care Gets a “Stryking” Digital Shift
Making Healthcare Digital: Stryker Revolutionizes Patient Care
In our Digital Shift series, we showcase companies that transform their business through digital transformation. This month, we shed some light on Stryker Corporation – an incumbent in medical technology that is driven to make healthcare better.
Stryker Corporation is a US-based medical care & operation equipment manufacturer. Established in 1941 with $14.31B in revenue in 2020, the company operates 5+ factories across continents producing medical, surgical devices for patients and hospitals around the world.
Stryker has achieved 32.5% growth in earnings per share (EPS) within the last 5 years (2014-2019). This growth is 3.5 times the Fortune 500 median from the same time period (%9.9). The firm kept its resilient growth among its peers during the consolidation and disruption of the medical care and technology sector.
Differentiation from the Industry
Stryker has an overarching core strategic approach to its operation. In the aftermath of the 2008 housing bubble, the company focused on key areas to utilize digital technologies to enable the core strategies. These strategies focus on business unit specialization, continuous acquisitions to diversify and strengthen its portfolio, international growth, and one of the most critical ones as cost transformation for growth. The company manufactures medical equipment and devices as well as provides high-end healthcare services to businesses and patients. The digital agenda comes into play in merger and acquisition strategy as well as cost transformation initiatives.
Stryker’s long-term ambitions are fueled by digital capabilities and its performance to execute on these objectives that stand out the company from the rest of the healthcare and medical devices industry.
The Digital Edge
The digital focus of Stryker puts the patient experience and journey at the center of its initiatives. Due to the pandemic conditions, Stryker’s position to alleviate barriers towards patient care and improve the patient journey through hospital and personalized care services has been solidified. The company focuses specifically on embedded, imaging, and mobile digital tools bundled with its medical equipment and devices to enhance the hospital and patient care.
The company collaborates with external innovation partners, utilizes an internal innovation engine, and acquires new technology and talents through mergers and acquisitions. The operations to enhance patient care drills down into 4 main areas: Accessibility, controlled distribution, security, and service excellence. The company also works with large tech vendors such as Microsoft to suit up its critical medical care equipment with IoT sensors and consolidate the data in the cloud-native IoT platform of Stryker.
Companies focus on elevating the patient journey with their services, digital solutions, and medical equipment is the primary source of its digital transformation success. The company also sustains these initiatives and reflects the success into the balance sheet through rigorous digitalization in its cost center operations to scale down its OpEx while maintaining the quality felt by customers high.
Incumbent stance on Stryker’s Journey
As a mainly hardware and equipment manufacturer for the healthcare domain, the digital horizon does not seem very clear and accessible like for other industries such as banking, insurance, and retail. Although this case is very real, this did not stop Stryker from pushing the future of healthcare and MedTech through digital enablement, bundling, and patient experience focus.
Incumbents of the MedTech and healthcare sectors are realizing the bitter-sweet of reality that after the pandemic every business is in the software business whether they like it or not. The question is not why and when in the current age, the question most crucial for the large businesses should revolve around how.
