The digital healthcare revolution was set in motion during the pandemic when adoption of telehealth became a necessity and healthcare was forced to go remote. The practice became widespread during the second wave of the pandemic. In 2022, it is expected to gain huge momentum for two reasons. Firstly, in the last two years it has emerged as an extremely reliable mode of improving healthcare. Due to its low cost of service delivery, it can also change the game for clinical development by pharmaceutical companies. Hospitals who have made the shift or have earmarked huge amounts to adopt telehealth at a much larger scale this year are all set to realize huge value. Therefore, this year healthcare companies will strive to address all the barriers that come in the way of making telehealth and telemedicine health all pervasive.
A report by Mckinsey throws light on the success of telehealth in 2021:
Telehealth grew by 38 times during the pandemic. It has been adopted to an extent of 13 to 17 percent across all specialties.
During this period, funding in virtual care and digital health skyrocketed, with a three-fold rise in venture capitalist investments.
Provider and consumer attitude toward telehealth has undergone a sea change during this period. Both are more open to the concept today than before.
Regulatory changes like reimbursable telehealth codes for the 2021 physician fee schedule introduced to facilitate the expansion of telehealth have been made permanent.
The exigencies of the last two years have ensured virtual healthcare models experiment, evolve and expand in a rapid pace. In 2022, telehealth will take a giant leap forward to improve virtual care access, patient experience, affordability and outcomes. Just as start-ups will get into a rat race to improve telehealth with the help of sophisticated technologies like AI, IoT and data analytics, healthcare providers will be on the look out to adopt the most promising technology to stay competitive.
| In 2021, a total of 541 healthcare deals amounting to about $21.3 billion were signed. In stark contrast to deals worth $14.6 billion signed in 2020. |
Telehealth will Expand to Treat Chronic Conditions
After the outbreak of the pandemic, telehealth helped providers to provide remote doctor-patient consultations for general health conditions. But in 2022, telehealth will evolve to include patients with chronic conditions on such a large scale that chronic treatment might well go remote altogether. This will ensure telehealth achieves its full potential. In 2021, telehealth helped to treat diabetes quite effectively. The success of this will encourage investors and providers to expand telemedicine services into more acute chronic care spaces like tuberculosis, cardiology etc.
In the field of cardiology, telehealth will particularly prove to be useful post cardiovascular related hospital discharge. It will facilitate patient follow-up through telemedicine programme. All it would require is a portable ECG and transfer of reports, by a mobile telephone or analogue, to a webserver which would be monitored round the clock by experts. These experts will liaise between hospital nurses and cardiologists.
| Patient dependence on telehealth services in 2021 Common illnesses/infections – 70% Follow-up visits – 66% Talk therapy – 50% Specialist visit – 25% Chronic condition – 45% Physical therapy – 18% |
In 2022 there will be a race to develop portable devices that will assist patients perform tests such as patient EKG, echocardiogram and ultrasound. Likewise, there will be a rush to develop technology that will help perform cardiology assessment through devices utilizing built-in stethoscope. Rapid investments will take place in developing pacemakers and implantable cardioverter–defibrillators (ICDs) to remotely transmit information on device function and malfunction on a minute-by-minute basis. This ensures that cardiac issues can be detected, and action can be taken no sooner than it happens. Emphasis will also be on developing advanced videoconferencing technologies, capable of transmitting physiological data (12-lead ECGs), to make remote cardiac monitoring more effective.
| Did You Know -About 93% of patients used telemedicine companies to manage prescriptions. (Medical Economics, 2020) –About 91% trust telemedicine to keep up with appointments, refills, manage prescriptions and regimen recommendations. (Medical Economics, 2020) –Telehealth visits helped patients reduce expenses between $19 and $121 made by trips to the ER. (Society of Actuaries, 2020) |
While there will be continued efforts to develop existing cardiac telehealth solutions that tend to deal with patients already having cardiovascular disease, 2022 will see renewed and efforts to develop telehealth technologies that can serve as powerful screening tools for identifying cardiac patients. Another area that will receive considerable focus is portable ‘telekiosks’ that will testing vital signs to assist cardiologists identify the risk of contracting a heart disease.
The Rise of Digital Therapeutics Applications to Facilitate Telemedicine
Along with telehealth, application of digital therapeutics saw a major rise in the last two years. Digital therapeutics are products that deliver therapeutic driven by software that provide interventions to prevent or treat a medical disease. One such digital therapeutics that was widely used during the pandemic was Welldoc a sugar monitoring application for self-care. During the lockdown the device a large number of diabetics control their A1C profile, streamline their exercise routine and manage their diet.
It is because of the effective application of this device that this year, investors will focus heavily on developing innovative and advanced digital therapeutics. The concurrent development of digital therapeutics along with telehealth will dramatically change the way healthcare is delivered in future. Both telemedicine companies and medical device players are looking to loop in patients with digital therapeutics in order to engage them in improving care. This will go a long way in entrenching telehealth as an accepted mode of treatment of chronic conditions.
| Did You Know The digital therapeutics market is expected to rise from $3.4 billion in 2021 to $13.1 billion by 2026. |
A few developments in the offing include adhesive patch technologies, that would enable remote monitoring of a patient’s physiological status. Further, to support telehealth with instant remote reports entrepreneurs will work towards creating advanced ‘intelligent tablets’ like Proteus Raisin that can detect and report their own ingestion.. Technology such as this not only make remote diagnosis and treatment a lot easier, but also will make treatment lightning fast and effective.
The pharmaceutical industry will be among those in the race to develop digital solutions to facilitate telehealth and telemedicine. Experts predict that the days are not far off when digital therapeutic solutions will be adopted on almost every therapeutic area, patients.
To meet these needs, medical device manufacturing companies and pharmaceutical companies have joined hands with technological companies to overcome data related and workflow related barriers. These include better data integration, mproved data flows and integration of virtual health-related activities into the day-to-day workflows of cliniciansLikewise, regulatory bodies on their part are trying to streamline incentives for virtual health activities to ensure alignment with value-based care. This makes sure that clinics and hospitals are freed from the uncertainties of fee-for-service and reimbursement parity.
This includes experimenting with virtual-health plans to make them popular with all stakeholders as well expanding the scope of virtual health care. The race will indeed intensify in 2022, because companies know that if they succeed, they will be changing the healthcare system in seismic ways and become a pioneer to lead the industry from the front.
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