The Future of HealthTech Behind the Scenes of Venture Capital
Healthtech is a branch of the health industry that focuses on any health product and service enabled by technology that can be delivered or consumed outside of any care facilities like hospitals, clinics, etc. Despite being one of the fastest growing verticals of the health industry, healthtech was already holding a large amount of capital in the pre-pandemic era with a market value of about $96.11 billion.
It is important to dissociate healthtech, which focuses on personal and preventive care from medtech, which focuses on medical and therapeutic devices and technology to diagnose or treat medical issues.
The past 10 years mark a considerable growth in healthtech. We have seen various advancements especially with the progress of remote monitoring, the appearance of electronic medical records and telemedicine. These milestones impacted the health industry for the better by making healthcare more accessible, more affordable and filling logistical gaps such as a lack of staff, the review of medical history or a lack of monitoring.
These improvements opened the door to lookouts for more technology and seeked to apply its medical advantages to the health sector.
The Covid-19 Injection
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed various complications of the health industry and adapted the systems in response to the fast-spreading pandemic. With social distancing and lockdowns, it was getting harder to get other diseases diagnosed or treated. The pandemic’s impact on the health industry was more of an injection since a lot of advancements such as telemedicine and remote monitoring were boosted and not invented, some with an enormous delay as healthcare was not always prioritized.
Telehealth in response to the challenges imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic is a suitable delivery method of health services as it conforms to social distancing. The pandemic also made the use of electronic medical records necessary and not an option anymore.
Despite numerous changes around Health, other elements like eHealth apps emerged more quickly than during pre-pandemic and served many people. These changes overall required a big implementation of technology into the healthcare system.
The pandemic fed a rich cloud of speculations as to what the future of healthtech holds symbolized by $21.6 billion worth of investments poured into digital health companies. This amount is more than double the investments made in the prior year, and almost four times the amount invested in 2016. But what lookouts for the future do these investments hold?
The Future Of healthTech
Like the name says, the hype around healthtech is engraved in technology. Technology is evolving fast and so are the emerging opportunities for the health industry. One would have been hesitant to invest considering the implementation challenges, but the pandemic changed perspectives on the importance of benefiting from an adequate healthcare sector.
We are now living at the dawn of a huge expansion of healthcare technology able to declare cancer and other diseases defeated in the next 30 years.
AI and robotics
Artificial intelligence (AI) has many uses in the health sector, we hear more about brain computers which are able to unify mind and machine. This technology can restore the ability to speak, move, and interact meaningfully with people and the environment for patients who have lost these fundamentals. AI can also make better use of electronic health records not only by automating some routines associated with medication refills and results notification but also by using them to predict further complications for prevention. However, the gold mine in AI and health lies in the diagnostics. AI will enable diagnostics to be much more effective and faster with pattern recognition deep-learning algorithms able to detect specific diseases the same way than humans would.
Robots have already been implemented in the health sector to assist in surgery or in service, improving monitoring and care experiences. We will see more of them in other aspects of the sector for various uses like prosthetics, service, social, transportation and more.
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of materials on a nanoscale (in nanometers, nm) to build microscopic structures or devices like fiber or bots for example. Nanotechnology holds a huge potential for the Health industry as it opens doors for the manipulation of DNA, more precise drug delivery and more powerful materials with nanofibers that can be used in implants, wound dressing, filtration and energy storage.
Wearable devices
Wearables are electronic devices that help in monitoring body metrics when placed on our body such as blood pressure, blood oxygen, heart rate, breathing rate, etc. Wearables can be very effective in monitoring chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart failure, but wearables can become an essential part of the care pathway by enabling the patient to have more control but also to have more momentous interventions with transparent, valuable data.
AR and VR
The pandemic raised a need for the Health industry to have remote access available. The hype around the metaverse introduced different perspectives. According to Statistica, the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) market in Europe is forecast to reach 20.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2025. The use of the AR for Health and the place of this sector within the metaverse seems to make quite some noise with different claims. AR and VR could make in-person clinical trials, in-person doctor’s offices and physical health records all products of the past if given the right complements such as wearables and other related technologies. AR and VR can be used as mediums to achieve the highest utility of technologies such as AI, telemedicine and wearables which could be controlled remotely, personalized experiences and efficiency without compromising quality. But AR and VR can also provide better training for staff by enabling more immersive experiences.
Limitations
A society fully reliant on technology to provide Health services raises a variety of red flags when it comes to accessibility, cybersecurity, implementation, privacy and diversity, among others. We have seen various security breaches when it came to technologies in the past, understandably, concerns over cybersecurity and privacy exist as a limitation to new technologies in the Health industry as consequences could be devastating for individuals.
For effective prevention and integrity, it is also important that AI algorithms are not biased racially, socioeconomically or ethnically if the goal is really to improve clinical care.
Moreover, the integrity not only lies in the patients but also in the diseases that these technologies can cover as it can be at the expense of misdiagnosed cases and ineffective treatments.
Lastly, technology in the Health industry raises questions of accessibility as not everyone has access to premium technology. Such an implementation would have to take economic and accessibility inequalities into account to operate under the responsible umbrella which includes values like fairness, transparency, inclusiveness, reliability and accountability.
Conclusion
Now that we have seen the future pillars of healthtech, predictions about its future are focused on predictive analysis, remote care, accurate targeting (for example with nanotechnology) and regenerative medicine (for example with robotics or brain computer interfaces).
The future of healthtech seems promising and enables us to explore further disciplines such as genomics at the benefit of genetic diagnostics and more. Yet, this will result in a whole new system. Some call it the Internet of Things (IofT) requiring strong and secure data sharing. Either way, what is being done right now is revealing a clearer path towards a technological future of the Health industry which reflects today’s vision translatable by the amount of investments poured in Healthtech.