We’re at a strange crossroads. On one hand, it feels as if the world stopped calculating the passage of time starting in March of 2020. On the other hand, in the healthcare industry, it feels as if we’ve sped ahead by two decades, with the normally slow pace of innovation breaking all kinds of records and expectations.
The sink or swim mentality brought on by the Covid pandemic accelerated innovation in every aspect of healthcare. Now, as the dust settles, many stakeholders are realizing that their reasons for resisting disruptive technology were unfounded, and they’re looking for ways to maximize the opportunities that Covid has opened up. Funding for digital health is blowing up, and the sky’s the limit for a healthcare world suddenly, and solidly, committed to tech innovations.
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Anish Sebastian Anish Sebastian co-founded Babyscripts in 2013 with the vision that internet enabled medical devices and big data would transform the delivery of pregnancy care. Since the company’s inception, they have raised over $37M. As the CEO of BabyScripts, Anish has focused his efforts on product and software development, as well as research validation […]
Here’s what we can expect to see more of in the upcoming year:
The rise of direct to consumer healthcare
Once relegated to niche siloes, direct-to-consumer technology or concierge approach has come roaring up the backstretch this year as the employer market becomes increasingly saturated. The high user-quality of tech offerings like GoodRx, Hims & Hers, Ro, and Curology have contributed to their success. These companies can’t afford to skimp on the user experience — because users pay out of pocket there is a higher barrier to adoption. On the other hand, the lack of a guaranteed customer base as well as less access to consumer data with the new ability to opt-out of in-app data sharing on the latest Apple iOS, means that these companies are punching up when it comes to user acquisition.
Mental health is top of mind
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The stigma around mental health issues has been slowly lifting over the past decade, but as with many things, Covid accelerated exposure to the problem and lent urgency to finding solutions, and with high profile celebrities like Simone Biles sharing their stories about mental health struggles, the market has never been more ripe for solutions. But while the marketplace has been flooded with text-based therapy apps and other meditation and mindfulness tools meant to support better mental health, questions around efficacy and outcomes plague their progress. We can expect to see continued demand for solutions, but innovators are going to have to figure out problems of scale and make a case for the suitability of digital mediums for dealing with issues such as trauma.
“Beyond” telemedicine
In the first frantic months of the pandemic, health systems rushed to offer “telemedicine” to their patients — in many cases, this simply meant a patient had the option to see a provider over video. Although in-person visits have returned, many patients have gotten used to the convenience of virtual care and expect to have it as an option, but worries about the quality of care and limitations on what kind of care can be delivered through video (hint: it’s not much) have driven the use remote patient monitoring (or RPM) as a supplementary tool. With RPM, patients can track some vitals from home through a connected or manual device, and add their data into a central database (ie, the EMR). One of the additional benefits of RPM that adds to its popularity is the ability to have asynchronous interactions between patient and provider — especially critical in a field that is experiencing increasing strain from provider shortages.
Digital health: From a solution to an ecosystem
The rapid influx of mobile applications for various health needs has created a new genre of technology — digital health companies that exist solely to serve other digital health companies. Digital marketplace services like Xealth and Redox simplify the process for providers to order and prescribe various digital tools and services directly through the EMR, while companies like Zus are attempting to cut through the problems of data isolation with a patient-centric data exchange solution.
Underlying all of these trends is a more widespread overhaul of the healthcare system. The Covid-19 pandemic had the healthcare industry plugging the dike with whatever tools came to hand. Now that the danger has been neutralized, it’s evaluating whether these tools are even the appropriate solution for the problems and needs of the modern day system. We’re going to keep seeing these infrastructure changes into the foreseeable future as the world adapts to a post-pandemic world.
Photo: Feodora Chiosea, Getty Images
Anish Sebastian co-founded Babyscripts in 2013 with the vision that internet enabled medical devices and big data would transform the delivery of pregnancy care. Since the company’s inception, they have raised over $37M. As the CEO of BabyScripts, Anish has focused his efforts on product and software development, as well as research validation of their product.
