Picture a doctor. You’re likely visualizing a person in a white coat – with a stethoscope hanging around their neck. It’s a symbol of the profession, a sort of visual shorthand. But it’s hard to imagine the revolutionary impact the humble stethoscope had on the practice of medicine. Prior to its invention by French physician René Laennec in 1816, doctors didn’t really touch patients – diagnosis was based on a patient’s description of their symptoms. The stethoscope, originally a monaural wooden tube that was placed against a patient’s chest to grant insight into the inner workings of their body, helped change the conception of disease from one purely based on symptoms to that of an anatomical problem. It also shifted the relationship to one more closed off from laypeople, where doctors trusted their technology more than the accounts of their patients. 

It’s an early illustration of healthtech, the use of technology to improve healthcare delivery and public health outcomes. 

Contemporary healthtech began with the digitization of patient records, allowing them to be shared seamlessly across healthcare providers. Internet access allowed people to book appointments and follow up with doctors online, or even get remote consultations. Smartphones have taken that a step further, while wearable devices have made real-time fitness and health monitoring a reality, supporting a more proactive approach to preventative care. Data analytics is being applied to the vast amounts of data collected and shared among healthcare providers, with AI assisting in predicting healthcare trends, determining patient risks, and developing appropriate treatment plans, along with the development of new drugs and vaccines. 

These are but a few of the innovations springing from the healthtech sector, a multibillion-dollar juggernaut attracting record high volumes of funding deals, but also one that promises to improve healthcare accessibility across the board. 

Emerging trends

Before we dig into the challenges that digital health innovations are helping to address, let’s take a look at some of the key trends shaping the industry. 

Digital health startups

The healthtech sector has seen major capital inflows to its burgeoning host of startups, fueling the growth of the industry and propelling greater innovation. These digital health startups have been working to find new solutions to longstanding healthcare challenges, often employing technology in novel ways or creating their own. By creating platforms for consultation, diagnostics, and medication delivery, they’re increasing people’s access to healthcare resources and empowering them to manage their health more proactively. 

A few examples include Autolus, which is developing next-generation programmed T-cell therapies for treating cancer and autoimmune diseases, Strive Health, which provides a chronic kidney disease management platform that leverages predictive analytics to improve patient care, and GlycanAge, a biotech startup that uses using glycan biomarkers as early indicators of health issues such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and insulin resistance.

AI in drug discovery

By harnessing sophisticated algorithms and machine learning to process extensive datasets, AI is transforming drug development, drastically cutting the time and expenses associated with introducing new treatments to the market. 

Read our article on AI drug discovery for a deep dive into this exciting topic.

Telehealth 

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a major shot in the arm for telehealth platforms, which have grown exponentially in reach and sophistication on the back of technological advancements and increased demand for accessible healthcare. AI, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and 5G networks have further enhanced the capabilities of these platforms, which have come to play an integral role in improving patient care, accessibility, and operational efficiency. 

Precision and personalized healthcare

Personalization has become the watchword of many an industry, and advances in genomics and AI have made personalized healthcare a reality. The idea is that by analyzing individual patient data, healthcare providers can help prevent illness, more accurately diagnose it should it occur, and administer treatments that are tailored to an individual’s genetic profile. It faces a number of challenges, notably the lack of sufficient diversity in clinical trials that would open the field up to everyone, but legislative actions are being taken to pave the way for improvements in this regard. 

Benefits of healthtech innovation

Healthcare has advanced unimaginably in the past century, and the digital revolution has only accelerated the pace of innovation in the sector. Crucially, however, it’s also helping to address long-standing challenges, both from a research and infrastructural perspective. These are some of the problems healthtech startups are targeting. 

Accessibility

Access to healthcare services and the typical patient model – as with almost any sort of goods or services – are subject to cultural and historical prejudice. Many factors can affect healthcare access, including race, ethnicity, poverty, geographic area, language, and disability status. Digital health companies are working to reach underserved communities that may have been neglected by traditional systems. 

A great example is Folx Health, a membership-based telehealth platform that caters to the LGBTQIA+ community through 24/7 virtual consultations and messaging, offering gender-affirming care, sexual and mental healthcare, and family planning services for same-sex couples. It’s a particularly timely venture – with a host of new discriminatory laws being signed across the US, Folx has seen surges in interest from those states worst affected. 

Telehealth’s ability to bridge geographical gaps has made access to healthcare far more convenient for rural and far-flung communities, granting people in these areas access to a greater standard of care, as well as specialists who they would previously have had to travel miles to see. The implications of this for developing nations are particularly profound, with internet and smartphone access opening a window to a world of preventative and diagnostic care. 

Enhanced care delivery

Telehealth aims to improve the overall standard of care available to people. It operates under four primary models. 

• General telemedicine address common health issues, in much the same way as a visit to the GP would.
• Specialized telemedicine provides niche care like dermatology or psychiatry, which in traditional settings have longer waiting times and are difficult to access for large swathes of the population.
• Asynchronous services like store-and-forward diagnostics, which allow patients or physicians to collect medical history and reports to be sent for diagnosis without a real-time consultation.
• Remote patient monitoring for chronic disease management, reducing the need for time-consuming visits to doctors’ offices and enabling a more proactive approach to care.

Take Hinge Health, for example, a digital care platform that helps patients manage chronic pain and musculoskeletal conditions. As these conditions can make visiting a healthcare provider in person difficult, the platform presents an opportunity for more consistent monitoring and care without the inconvenience of travel. Hinge combines teleconsultations with physical therapists, mobile app-based exercise therapy programs, and tailored educational resources, along with wearable motion sensors that enable real-time feedback on patient motions and progress.

It’s important to understand that telehealth doesn’t aim to replace conventional medicine – rather, it supplements in-person care, improving the overall efficiency of the healthcare system. For this reason, integration with legacy systems is crucial, and should be prioritized by the relevant government ministries and healthcare providers alike. Local and national legislation needs to find alignment on telehealth, while doctors and patients need to become familiar and comfortable with the technology involved. 

Improving systemic efficiency is important given the rising costs of healthcare, particularly in countries like the US, where many people are increasingly unable to afford to seek medical attention. The US has much to gain by drawing on the resources of its deep, diverse corporate healthcare sector, which, if given proper incentive, may well drive the lion’s share of global healthtech innovation, ultimately bringing down costs and delivering better healthcare outcomes. Such outcomes for individuals and communities improve overall public health, which in turn reduces the strain on healthcare systems. 

Properly harnessed, healthtech can kick-start this cycle by reducing wasted spending. While telehealth is faster and more convenient, and frees up staff and other resources, if integrated with AI and big data management, it can also ensure patients are directed to the appropriate level of care, can consult with physicians across the world, and appointments are integrated into scheduling systems and connected to patient records, thereby reducing administrative work and ensuring physicians have a clear picture of a patient’s condition before they see them. 

Accelerated drug discovery and development

One of the most exciting frontiers of healthtech is the application of AI in drug discovery. 

Traditional drug development is fraught with challenges, including costs ranging from $500 million to $3 billion and timelines extending beyond 10 years. Owing to the high stakes involved, only the most promising research paths are pursued, while other potential projects often fall by the wayside due to insufficient justifiable investment.

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Drug development is an intensively iterative process, making AI an apt match for it. AI aids in disease identification by detecting patterns in extensive datasets, enhancing predictions and efficiencies. It assists in target identification and lead discovery by pinpointing potential therapeutic agents. It also predicts physicochemical properties such as solubility, partition coefficient, and degree of ionization, reducing the number of time- and labor-intensive clinical trials necessary. Moreover, AI and other digital tools applied to clinical trials can enhance efficiency in trial designs, speed up enrollment, and boost patient engagement and retention, thereby reducing costs and increasing success rates. 

Although there have been some early successes, AI's use in drug development is still in its relatively early stages, and there are plenty of challenges to overcome. AI cannot simply be integrated into existing datasets without proper data architecture, so an intelligence layer needs to enable it to comprehend complex data like molecular structures, clinical operations, and patient information. This requires collaboration between data scientists and leaders in business strategy, medical affairs, and legal and risk. Moreover, selecting the right AI model is not the key strategic differentiator, as most of the work involves adapting these models to a company's internal knowledge base and use cases, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry due to its data complexity and unique regulations. Effective change management is crucial for integrating generative AI across complex workflows, as is a strategic roadmap to optimize overall impact.

A prime example of a startup making great inroads in this space is Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage biotechnology business that specializes in pharmaceutical research and development. The company uses generative AI to speed up the drug development process and mitigate risks, and was reportedly responsible for the first AI-discovered drug candidate to reach Phase II clinical trials. 

Moving towards preventive care

More than 500 years ago, the Dutch philosopher is said to have coined the phrase “Prevention is better than cure”. It’s a simple principle that has often been neglected in the growth and corporatization of healthcare, where capitalist interests trump those of public benefit. However, preventive care can dramatically reduce long-term healthcare costs by addressing conditions before they escalate. Healthtech could shift the needle on this. 

Wearable devices that monitor people’s biometric data in real time can feed that information into electronic health records, granting insights into their overall health or response to a specific treatment. Such devices include heart monitors, continuous glucose monitors, smartwatches, and fitness trackers. These are helping in the development of digital biomarkers, and the data gathered can help detect subtle physiological changes that might indicate an underlying problem, and will be increasingly useful in the field of personalized medicine. Wearables can also empower people to engage more actively with their health, potentially making lifestyle interventions without the need for consultation with a physician. 

Big data coupled with predictive analytics is also a key tool in this regard, with algorithms applied to vast datasets able to make forecasts about individual and public health outcomes. The digitization of health records means that an increasing variety of data sources, including medical imaging, genetic markers, lifestyle and environmental factors, and physician’s reports, can be analyzed in order to identify patterns that point to specific outcomes. 

The implications of this for preventive care are enormous, with digital health technologies assisting doctors in providing personalized healthcare recommendations based on an individual’s risk profiles, or directly to the patient themselves. The insights gleaned from these datasets can be used to inform public health initiatives, enabling targeted interventions for at-risk demographics and better allocation of resources across the overall system. 

Why it’s important to stay informed

As healthcare providers, patients, and governments work out how best to use these developing healthcare technologies, interested organizations must also work to stay abreast of which are relevant and worthy of development, adoption, or investment. Market intelligence is an essential tool for staying informed about the industry, innovations, and startups, and technologies – not just unto themselves, but their use cases too. SPEEDA Edge offers market intelligence solutions backed by validated data and a team of dedicated analysts who are available to dig deeper into the data, helping organizations make truly informed strategic decisions about healthtech.

Conclusion

It’s an exciting and extraordinary stage in the evolution of healthcare, a sector that has historically been at the forefront of science, but is now seeing a plethora of new technologies applied in novel ways. From wearable devices to AI-discovered drugs, these have the potential to offer faster, more efficient, and more personalized healthcare, hopefully reducing costs and improving public health outcomes along the way. To learn more about how SPEEDA Edge can help your company stay ahead of the healthtech curve, contact us for a personalized demo. For a deeper dive into the companies shaping this space, see our pick of the top healthtech startups.