Analysts are abuzz about deals like the acquisition of AOl by Verizon. The conventional wisdom seems to be the synergies will be around using AOL videostreaming delivered over Verizon pipes using mobile devices. Looming in the back ground is the question of how this platform can be used in sick care and preventive medicine.  The next shoe has dropped with the announcement that Verizon is buying Yahoo for $4.83 billion. They want the advertising revenue for their video platform.

The next big consolidation happened when AT & T bought Time-Warner. Then, CenturyLink acquired Level 3.

Here is how 5G will impact sick care.

In a bid to make a bigger telemedicine play, telecommunications giant Comcast decides to move from merely being a Doctor on Demand customer to buy the business. It will offer telemedicine as a premium cable service so that customers can communicate with healthcare professionals in their homes, with chronic conditions and mental health being of particular interest. Comcast is teaming up with one of the nation’s largest Blue Cross health insurers, Independence Health Group, to launch a new consumer-oriented health-care technology platform.

Will other cable companies follow suit?

This is probably not the last news we will hear about consolidation and convergence of  healthcare, telecommunications, media and mobile. With medicine moving from bricks and mortar to an expanded digical model-digital and physical- health communications and media companies will become integral parts of care delivery, information and education. After all, 6.8B people in the world have a cell phone.

Digital health is over. Sickcare ICT has taken it’s place and new models have emerged to claim market dominance.

Global Verizoncare will create both challenges and opportunities and open up many markets in developing countries with emerging middle classes demanding access to state of the art care and technology. Particularly for those in remote and difficult to access areas outside of the megacities, the hope is that Communicare will improve access, reduce costs, raise quality and the human experience.

PwC research suggests that information and communications technology companies (ICTs) have created value using 5 different strategies:

1. Category leaders.These companies focus on building a dominant position in a relatively narrow product or service category. They use that position to shape and influence the supply markets and sales and delivery channels in that category. A key indicator of this strategy is the positioning of a company’s products and services.

2. Consolidators.These companies lead their category through repeated acquisitions. They roll up other companies to provide consumers with access to a platform of products and services, or simply to offer a product lineup that could be assembled no other way.

3.Innovators. These companies continually develop and introduce new and creative products or services to the market. Investment in R&D is the primary indicator of this strategy.

4.Solutions customizers. Companies following this strategy make use of insight and market intelligence to offer tailored products or services that address customers’ specific

5. Value players. These companies seek enterprise business by lowering the costs of competitive services.

In addition, videoanalytics will become an integral part of monitoring and changing doctor and patient behavior.

Do you have an innovation strategy?

As interface technology companies like Google, Apple, AT&T, and media content and delivery companies, like Comcast and Dish, get more involved in sickcare, it will present many challenges and opportunities:

1. Integrating different business models. Some suggest that if you want to see the future of sickcare, then look at the changing business models of newspapers and cable. Why pay for channels you don’t watch?

2. Resolving the cultural differences of disparate industries

3. Educating and training Doctors 2.0 in how to use evolving technologies

4. How to address the data issues and implement solutions.

5. Cybersecurity, confidentiality and security

6. Overlapping, and sometimes, conflicting ecosystems

7. The legal and regulatory environment of disparate industries and trying to resolve them. The FDA is not the only or most imporant regulator. Get inside the head of the FCC instead.

8. Intellectual property conflicts

9. A new investment landscape that will take time to take hold

10. Barriers to adaption and penetration in the medical community

11. Closing the sick care digital divide

12. Integrating ICT into the EMR whole product solution

So far, US telecom carriers have struggled to make it work, while others have seen more success.

The impact will not stop at sick care. Google has already made an impact on crowdsourced public health and epidemiology.

How would Microsoft design EMRs?What does Apple have in mind in buying personal health data startup Glimpse?

Other interface collaborations are positively electrifying

Sick care coherence and convergence will continue to evolve across industries, technologies and markets and doctors will have to learn how to practice medicine using many new tools and delivery channels. Practicing Coherentcare will be challenge.

Sick care is starting to look a lot more like a pumps and pipes business. The doctor treating a patient will be only the first episode of what will probably be a long running prime time show. The goal is to consolidate broadband care and make it anywhere care, moving from telesickcare to telehealthcare.

Here is what Verizon is thinking about the customer experience.

Sickcare is no longer one industry, but many and will continue to grow as such.

You’ve got telehealth, shopgirl.