Analysing Disruption within HealthTech

In recent years, consumers have been increasingly taking more interest in their health and wellness. Their buying habits have changed, reflecting this new trend e.g. buying more organic and healthy food or keeping track of fitness levels through wearables such as Fitbits. This is leading to significant changes in the healthcare sector and we are heading towards a completely patient empowered world.

HealthTech, also know as digital health, uses technology to increase healthcare delivery efficiencies and deliver consumer-centric applications. It can use mobile, cloud and other IT systems to target a broad range of applications from in-hospital workflow to in-home monitoring to consumer wellness.
HealthTech is a rapidly growing industry both in terms of investment amount and number of deals. According to CB Insights, total venture investment volume has increased by 39.8% p.a. and the number of transactions increased by 11.4% p.a. from 2013 to 2016.

There are several factors driving healthtech innovation with the main ones being:
- Change in consumer expectations as expectations have been driven up by technological innovations such as Amazon’s same-day delivery and mobile payments using Apple Pay or Android Pay, so consumers are more willing to embrace new innovative solutions to get the same service in a simpler and more efficient manner
- Ageing and growing populations and increasing life expectancies since with increasing medicinal breakthroughs and treatment advances as well as improved living conditions, hence we have an ageing population, which results in additional demand for healthcare services
- Increasing health awareness by consumers as mentioned at the beginning of the article
Key Trends of HealthTech
These factors are leading to key trends in the industry that are revolutionising the healthcare experience. Some of the main trends are:
- Telehealth fostering more flexible healthcare and improved patient engagement: Patients with chronic diseases may be able to lead more independent lives without constantly having to visits hospitals and those who live in remote regions are able to receive treatment from specialists across the world
- Artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more consumer and client facing: AI is taking on more sophisticated roles and working alongside professionals to augment clinician decision making such as medical consultation, medication management and designing treatment plans
- Virtual Reality (VR) leading to innovative treatments as well as revolutionising medical training: VR is being leveraged to create revolutionary treatment methods like treating phobias, improving eyesight and helping stroke victims. In addition to this, VR programmes help train and teach medical students anatomy, pharmacology and surgery
- Internet of Things (IoT) promoting advances in healthcare and patient care: IoT is increasingly being used to target improvements in patient engagement, patient safety and disease management such as using IoT sensors to predict epileptic seizures
Key Challenges of HealthTech
However, there are some key challenges for start-ups looking to succeed in this field with the two main ones being:
- Regulatory challenges: Operating regulatory hurdles is key in this sector to build trust with consumers and fuel innovation, especially as more guidelines are put in place with regards to the treatment of patient data
- Privacy protection of using patients’ data: Without appropriate consent to personal data, it is difficult to prevent diseases, understand outbreaks in certain diseases or optimise patient treatments. Trust and transparency from start-ups are key in reassuring consumers to grant access to their data
These challenges are slowly being overcome with consumers seeing the benefit that these new start-ups are providing. Subsequently, the healthcare sector is rapidly changing, especially in the UK. In 2014, Boris Johnson (Mayor of London at the time) launched MedCity, a joint programme between universities in South East of England: Imperial, Kings College London, UCL, Cambridge and Oxford, to boost UK life sciences and establish London and South East of England as a world-leading cluster for life sciences. The current Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, supported the sector through the backing of digitalhealth.london accelerator scheme launched in 2016 (the first of its kind), which is currently helping 32 digital health firms design solutions to better engage with the NHS.
Through these types of programmes and change in consumers’ behaviour and expectations, coupled with new emerging technologies, we are just at the beginning of the exciting healthtech journey! I am personally very excited to see how healthcare changes, for example I am counting down the days until VR technology and robots / AI enable the first remote patient operation — we have already seen the first VR operation live streamed by Dr Shafi Ahmed in 2016 so it can only be a matter of time.
By Abhilash Dubbaka
Abhilash Dubbaka is currently an Investment Banking Analyst and an investor with a passion for the Technology sector. He has a keen interest in FinTech and AR and VR sectors. If you have any comments, please contact Abhilash through LinkedIn or reply to this post.
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