The Future of Digital Health

Big tech companies like Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Apple, IBM and Microsoft are taking their move into healthcare and medicine seriously. They are developing new, health-related features on their platforms. They are also teaming up with research institutions and developers to create new tools for patients, doctors and other stakeholder in medicine – and they are heavily investing in partnerships with start-ups or launching new ventures. This guide details how and why the move of the big tech companies happens to healthcare.

Seeing the growth of digital health funding, now it's a good time to talk about the motives of investment firms and explore the hidden gems of digital health investments: which trends stand out and more importantly, how to assess the technologies and companies that pop up.

In this book, we are sharing insights into the most innovative companies and technologies in digital health, and Artificial Intelligence:

1 . Digital Health By The Numbers: The global digital health market was valued at over 200 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. According to forecasts, this figure is expected to exceed 500 billion dollars by 2025. What will be the leading drivers of this growth?

2. Where To Invest? The Top 24 Digital Health Technologies: From Virtual Reality, through Artificial Intelligence to At-home lab tests, what are the top technologies to look out for

3. Key Learnings from Successful and Failed Startups: Why meeting real-life patient/clinical needs is key and overhype should be avoided

We hope you will find our publication a useful addition to the toolset of investors to find the next big thing in digital health and A.I. that can make the lives of patients and the job of medical professionals better.

Every medical specialty will transform differently due to the technological revolution. On certain fields, such as nursing, psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology, innovation will have much less impact than on dentistry, cardiology or pathology. In this e-book we specify in detail how the appearance of artificial intelligence, sensors, wearables, VR/AR or robots affect each medical specialty in order to be able to discern what skills physicians will need in the future.

We aim to show how physicians of the various professions can successfully prepare for the sweeping changes coming with the waves of technology. We want to go against the fears that artificial intelligence, robots or any other innovative solutions will take over doctors’ jobs. While digital technologies certainly have the capacity to take over administrative tasks, organizational processes or even simpler diagnostic steps, the expertise of medical professionals is irreplaceable. Especially if they recognize that their jobs can be much more efficient, creative or even fun if they embrace digital technologies. At the moment, as these innovations are still in the early days of their usage, that doesn’t always seem so.

However, we are certain that technologies will unburden doctors, nurses and other medical professionals in the long run, especially if they learn in time how to cooperate with technologies successfully. Here’s our guide on how to do that.

From time to time we at The Medical Futurist ask ourselves: what’s the point of the digitisation of healthcare and the use of advanced technologies in the practice of medicine? Where does it lead us and in what form does it contribute to our everyday lives?

Explore a future where healthcare becomes seamless, preventive, and fully centered on you. In this concise analysis from The Medical Futurist, discover the digital technologies with real power to transform medicine, empower patients, and strengthen the patient-physician bond.

By mapping out trends and maturity levels, this e-book uncovers how data-driven insights and cultural shifts can create a proactive, hopeful vision for the future of healthcare—and place you at its very heart.

In previous years, The Medical Futurist published annual e-books about digital health trends regarding potential developments that were worth keeping an eye on for that particular year. Based on our analyses and forecasts, these trends help give a bigger picture regarding the direction that the field was heading towards during that year; even though not all forecasts came to fruition.

This current e-book also shares our insights about noteworthy trends based on similar analyses. However, unlike our previous annual trends e-books, we do not restrict ourselves to a current year but look at the short-term future now, with the developments likely to happen in the next 2-5 years. Moreover, we don’t only focus on these insights but also help in providing context about those trends and relevant technologies in general.

In this book, we elaborate on 20 trends that we have been constantly monitoring and that we believe will have the most importance in shaping the digital health landscape in the near future:

1. Patient empowerment is the biggest milestone in the history of medicine
2. Lifestyle medicine is the redesign primary care has needed
3. Globalised healthcare brings precision medicine to life
4. Pharma companies & digital health: packaging a medication with a digital health service
5. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing has an edge in drug sensitivity
6. Nutrigenomics is the biggest promise of digital health
7. Food scanners are lagging behind
8. ECG devices have led the regulatory race for portable diagnostic devices
9. A.I.-guided portable ultrasound devices are the unicorns of digital health
10. The conscious health consumer of the future uses sensors and loses privacy
11. Virtual visits and chatbots represent the new primary care
12. Artificial Intelligence needs a prospective upgrade and the video game industry can help
13. Bioprinting: It is possible to bioprint living tissues but not organs
14. 3D printing can customize treatments and supplement the medical supply chain
15. The automation race defines whether A.I. can outperform physicians
16. COVID-19 has catalyzed technological adoption, but not the cultural one
17. Mixed reality can transform virtual meetings and medical education
18. Virtual reality can help ease pain for patients in the hospital
19. Robots only roam rich hospitals and pharmacies
20. Digital health insurance companies will have no competitors

Each section contains an aspect that we wanted to highlight about that technology or trend based on our analyses by studying the field for years. We also walk you through that area with relevant descriptions and examples that we find interesting. Additionally, we include further reading suggestions at the end of every section which you can turn to so as to dive deeper into the subject.