Digital Health industry trends 2020:
Scope of Global Digital Health Industry Reports-
Digital health concept is defined as the use of technology to help improve individuals' health and wellness through digital care programs. These technologies consist of both hardware and software solutions and services, such as telemedicine, web-based analysis, email, mobile phones applications, text messages, wearable gadzets, and clinic or remote monitoring sensors. Mainly, digital health industry is established with the vision of developing interconnected health systems to improve the use of computational technologies, smart devices, computational analysis techniques, and communication media to support healthcare professionals as well as their clients in managing illnesses and health risks, as well as promote health and wellbeing. Digital health industry is a multi-disciplinary sector which includes many stakeholders, comprising clinicians, researchers and scientists with a varied range of expertise in healthcare, engineering, social sciences, public health, health economics and data management.
Global Digital Health Industry Market is valued at USD 109.47 billion in 2019 and expected to reach USD 603.602 billion by 2026 with the CAGR of 27.62% over the forecast period.
Global Digital Health Industry Dynamics –
Improvement in providing quality healthcare services, increased accuracy in diagnosing and treating diseases, growing awareness among consumers to manage their health with the help of new gadgets and increasing research activity in converging digital technology with health care by major companies are driving the digital health industry. For example, Google is pioneering the digital health industry by introducing services such as Google Health and Google Fit to improve the life of customers and are investing lot of effort into healthcare related AI through DeepMind unit. Other than that, Apple is trying to provide digital health services by expanding the functionality of its products such as iPhone or Apple Watch to provide Research Kit and health records to other end users. The extent of use of digital technology for healthcare purpose can be known from the fact that approximately 5% of google searches are related to health. According to Google, search enables 3 times more visitors to hospital sits compared to hospitals who have no websites, which shows that online is becoming the preferred way to find healthcare providers. Other than internet use, mobile healthcare apps and wearables is driving the consumer side of digital health significantly. The rapid growth in digital health industry is related to increase in demand of wearables such as Apple Watch and FitBit bands. Other than that, there is rapid integration between digital service providers with healthcare providers which drives the market considerably, for example, Apple has purchased a medication delivery company and Amazon have acuired Health Navigator, a start-up providing symptom lookup and digital triage tools
Recent Development- COVID-19 cough screening app in development
30 June 2020
The Novoic have introduced a COVID app that works by recording someone’s cough and using an algorithm to analyze cough patterns to screen them for virus detection.
Novoic is now requesting for one million volunteers to donate their cough so that they can distinguish effectively between the sound of COVID-19 infected patients and those who are not infected.
It is expected that the app could be launched as early as August if they get enough data. As a potential vaccine will take minimum a year, public health experts believe the best way of resisting the virus is by testing, tracing contacts and isolating patients if necessary, which requires a large scale screening.
Novoic was established at the beginning of 2019, is venture capital-backed, and is being accelerated at the Oxford Foundry, an entrepreneurship centre at the University of Oxford, through its L.E.V8 accelerator and COVID-19 Action Plan.
The company applies advanced speech analysis to detect brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It is now using the same technology to fight COVID-19.
Recent Trends in Digital Health Industry-
The rise of on-demand healthcare (why patients want healthcare on their own schedule)
On demand healthcare is trending among consumers in digital health industry in 2020. It is a customized version of healthcare service where a consumer chooses things at their one convenience, on their own time and wherever they happened to be which is now possible due to the increasing adoption of mobiles and internet.
For example, recent statistics show that over 50% of all web browsing in the world occurs through mobile devices as of 2018 and number of mobile users globally have exceeded five billion mark which have positively affected the digital health industry in rapid adoption of digital health services.
An example of on-demand healthcare is Nomad Health company– an online platform that links doctors directly with medical facilities for short-term work – are easily providing on-demand healthcare to clients in specific circumstances that match talents, expertise, and schedule. In other terms, doctors themselves have become on-demand healthcare providers to satisfy the patients, which is another benefit of digital health industry.
The importance of big data in healthcare:
Big data is another trend for digital health industry in 2020. For the healthcare industry, big data provides several important benefits, such as lower rate of medication errors, facilitating preventive care, more accurate staffing etc. For example, through patient record analysis, advanced software can recognize any variations between a patient’s health and drug prescriptions, informing health professionals and patients of potential medication error. Big data analysis could identify regular hospital goers and make preventive plans to keep them from returning. In reality, drug makers believe that one of the biggest advantages of big data is its helping hand in understanding the market and with that understanding, the companies can determine product repetition and product budgets by the analysis of existing and future demand.
Treating patients with virtual reality:
Virtual Reality (VR) is another technological advancement which have propelled the digital health industry in recent years and expected to be trendy in 2020 because of its various applications are greatly changing the way patients are being treated. For example, VR technology is being used in treatment of chronic pain, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and stroke. Additionally, VR applications include, doctors and residents using virtual-reality simulations to improve their skills or to plan complicated surgeries. VR headsets is also used to motivate wearers to exercise and teach children with autism on how to navigate the world. This also helps the companies to better engage with their customers through virtual reality which helps in increasing the popularity of the digital health industry.
The growth of wearable medical devices:
Another trend of the digital health industry is companies gathering their own health data from medical devices, such as wearable gadgets. In the digital age, patients are now focusing on prevention and maintenance of health and want to be aware about their health more frequently. This leads to healthcare companies being more proactive by investing in wearable technology devices that can give up-to-date monitoring of high-risk patients to analyze the likelihood of a major health risk.
The wonders of artificial intelligence:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming in to more than just a digital transformation trend in healthcare. The bright perspective of AI has motivated industry players in investing millions in it. The healthcare AI-powered tools market is expected to surpass USD34 billion by 2025, which means this technology will be applied in almost all facets of the industry. Moxi, a friendly hospital droid designed to assist human nurses with routine tasks such as fetching and restocking supplies is one of the advanced applications of AI in healthcare industry.
Other examples of AI based technological applications are Chatbots and virtual health assistants. Chatbots has multiple applications from customer service representatives to diagnostic tools and even therapists.
But the real advantage of AI can be observed in healthcare segments such as precision medicine, medical imaging, drug discovery, and genomics. For example, cancer patients, now due to AI’s advanced pattern recognition technology, these patients have access to personalized therapies tailored to their genetic makeup.
Additionally, top pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are applying machine learning algorithms to cut the drug development cycle. In reality, recent research show that AI can decrease early drug discovery timelines by four years compared to the industry average and generate cost savings of 60%.