The new Frost & Sullivan Global Digital Health Outlook 2020 analysis predicts the market will exceed $234.5bn (~€212.26bn) by 2023.
The healthcare industry’s steady shift toward improved patient outcomes, cost containment, and value-based care is expected to drive the global digital healthcare market from an estimated $147bn in 2019 to $234.5 billion in 2023.
As the digital healthcare market grows, the need for cybersecurity will accelerate as well. Regulators in the United States and other countries will impose hefty fines and penalties on those healthcare providers that do not adequately protect patient data from the constant threats to patient privacy and data security.
Femtech and digital therapeutics will also grow as opportunities in both medical-grade and mass-market products and solutions offer new ways to manage health.
Defining digital health
Victor Camlek, Transformational Health Research Manager, said: “We have defined digital health as the application of data to the delivery of healthcare, using computational and telecommunications technologies to support business process workflow, clinical workflow, and patient data management.
“This definition spells out the opportunities for growth that will influence established organisations to transform their business models and entice new entrants to change the way healthcare is delivered.
“All healthcare stakeholders, patients, payers, providers, and pharma will benefit, as will technology-based companies that increase their efforts to address new opportunities across the global healthcare market.”
Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Global Digital Health Outlook, 2020, presents a comprehensive view of the most significant areas of change that will drive growth and innovation across the global digital health landscape.
It identifies major data points within digital health and the impact of future milestones predicted for 2020. It covers the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, digital therapeutics, Big Data, IT-enabled employee health and wellness management, remote patient monitoring, telehealth, femtech, and data analytics.
Future opportunities
To gain a competitive edge, organisations will look to tap growth opportunities by:
- Ensuring the presence of an experienced IT organisation that can manage a mix of internal and cloud-based infrastructure, platforms and services;
- Developing an ecosystem of companies that contribute to a superior value proposition for all stakeholders;
- Allocating significant resources to cybersecurity;
- Offering data cleansing and curation to optimally leverage Big Data analytics stimulated by the anticipated growth in patient-generated health data from remote patient monitoring; and
- Providing a combination of devices, platforms, data management solutions, and services, including data from a mix of mass-market and medical-grade wearables.
Camlek said: “The rise in the senior population in countries, such as the US, China, Japan, India, and the UAE, is generating huge demand for digital health applications such as telemedicine, chatbots, mHealth, and AI.
“This, coupled with anticipated shortages of physicians and medical staff, will compel all industry participants to embrace digitalisation as the foundation of the next generation of patient access, clinical decision support, workflow management, and population health management.”
