Digital Health & Artificial Intelligence 2020: Trends, Opportunities, and Outlook

Digital health and artificial intelligence (AI) promises to change the face of healthcare. Reflecting this is growing interest in the digital health space, as evidenced by a substantial growth in investment over the past few years. Major players from the pharmaceutical, medtech, health insurance, retail and technology industries are all forging ahead with investments and internal product development.

 

Digital health is a convoluted and complex field, much of which is made up of technologies and services that enable healthcare outside of traditional clinical settings. It follows a global trend in the healthcare industry of decentralization to alleviate overburdened hospitals and clinics. Coupled with escalating healthcare costs, shrinking profit margins and ageing populations suffering with chronic conditions, digital health offers a solution to these problems for all players in the space including patients, providers and payers. In fact, it presents such an alluring and lucrative opportunity that companies not previously in the healthcare space are making significant investments and moves to do so. Big tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft have continued to make significant strides into the healthcare space since their announcements in January 2018.

 

The time is ripe for digital health due to the combination of a number of factors. These include changing population demographics, as well as current and upcoming changes to regulations and reimbursements which mean that the route to market and take-up of digital health services and technologies is more likely. Rising capabilities in artificial intelligence, connectivity and technologies such as continuous glucose monitoring enable new forms of health communication, patient treatment and monitoring, and streamlining of healthcare services.

 

Telemedicine, referring to the remote delivery of healthcare services using technology, is seeing rising demand. Benefits of telemedicine include increased convenience to patients, improved quality of care, improved outcomes, and cost savings. Telemedicine and remote patient monitoring technologies enable patients to leave the hospital earlier and to stay healthy at home for longer. On the other hand, physicians benefit from the broader use of technology in telehealth, including improved communication between practitioners, access to specialists, and even remote training.

 

By whichever name it comes under, whether that's digiceuticals, digital therapeutics or software-as-a-drug, this idea of software replacing drugs is a worry for large, established pharmaceutical companies. Coupled with the changing landscape of healthcare which is moving away from treating patients and towards a model of preventative care and a move from fee-based to value-based services, healthcare delivery is being disrupted and digital health threatens to cause even more turbulence.

 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing medical diagnostics. The state-of-the-art results have already demonstrated that software can achieve fast and accurate image-based diagnostics on various conditions affecting the skin, eye, hear, lung, breast, and so on. These technological advancements can help automate the diagnosis and triage processes, accelerating the process to speed up the referral process especially in urgent cases, freeing up expert resources, offering the best accuracy everywhere regardless of skill levels, and making the processes more widely available. This is a ground-breaking development with far-reaching consequences. Naturally, many innovators are scrambling to capitalize on these advancements.

 

This report outlines the state-of-the-art in AI-based diagnosis of various conditions affecting the skin, eye, heart, breast, brain, lung, blood, genetic disorder, and so. The data sources employed are diverse including dermoscopic images, fundus images, OCT, CT, CTA, echocardiograms, electrocardiogram , mammography, pathology slides, low-res mobile phone pictures, and so on. This report then identifies and highlights companies seeking to capitalize on these technology advances to automate the diagnostic and triage process.

 

This report provides a detailed overview of the digital health ecosystem including insights into the key trends, opportunities and outlooks for all aspects of digital health, including:

• Telehealth and telemedicine

• Remote patient monitoring

• Digital therapeutics / digiceuticals / software as a medical device

• Diabetes management

• Consumer genetic testing

• Smart home as a carer

• AI in diagnostics

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