Simin Zhou, UL Ventures, looks at the top three healthcare trends to watch in 2020.
A Johns Hopkins study found that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. To achieve sustainable healthcare that both gives us the best outcomes and dramatically reduces costs in the coming decades, technology advancements are critical. Artificial intelligence (AI) and medical devices are going to be huge parts of healthcare in the near future, and it will be important to establish safety guidelines and ensure regulatory standards are met but not prohibitive to the development of breakthrough technology. As we head into 2020, here are three industry-changing healthcare trends to watch out for.
A shift is coming from hospital to home care
In the next ten to 20 years, AI will place emphasis on home care over hospitals to allow for more continuous patient care. While apps that monitor health and symptoms at home (i.e. wearable injector devices for diabetes) are available today, AI will allow for more comprehensive disease management and coordinated care that merges the virtual and physical across monitoring, planning, and treatment. Further, AI will make it possible to predict what will happen at various stages of care, allowing for even greater personalisation that is designed to achieve significantly improved outcomes. For example, the startup KenSci is using AI to analyse data across sources like electronic medical records, public records, demographics, claims data, and devices to enhance healthcare outcomes. It can identify patients who are at risk of COPD before they are admitted and remotely monitor COPD patients’ symptoms, physiology and treatment at home via data from medical devices.
Tech is redefining safety in healthcare with usability playing a growing role
With healthcare and technology coming together, there’s an increasing need to study how human beings interact with technology in a clinical environment to reduce human error. With so many new devices and technological aspects to care, it’s critical that healthcare professionals and patients alike use new tools properly and with relative ease. Emergo by UL is the world leader in human factor engineering research and it’s already looking into the usability of connected injection devices (CIDs). CIDs typically involve an injection device with embedded connectivity to a smartphone app and cloud-based data storage. Developers need to account for potential usability issues such as what happens when a user’s phone runs out of battery power and the app isn’t accessible.
Greater efficiencies needed for commercialising new medical devices
The global patchwork of regulations causes enormous delay in getting new medical devices to market. The time it takes to assess the steps for bringing a product to market in different geographies exacerbates that delay. Required upfront regulatory and market research is one step in the process that can be sped up to allow faster iteration and make it easier to replicate successes. This is another area where digital health solutions are providing innovation, making it possible to standardise and automate regulatory processes by aggregating data and providing actionable insights. This will reduce workload and errors that consume companies’ time and drives up costs in the development phase. RAMS, created by UL, is an example of a new digital platform that simplifies and automates this part of the development process.
Conclusion
Technology has the potential to dramatically improve our healthcare system, and with an ageing population and people living longer, time is of the essence. We must shift more care away from overflowing hospitals and focus on preventative and continuous care at home. In order to continue to drive innovation in healthcare in 2020, we need to focus on bringing new technology to market in a faster and responsible way.
