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Research Type - Insights Research by Market - Healthcare Technology Analyst - Roeen Roashan Analyst - Shane WalkerBy Attribute
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Connectivity is everywhere, but continuity is nowhere.May 29, 2018The value proposition of consumer medical devices should not be ignored, not now, as consumers increasingly engage in personal health, nor in the future of healthcare, where patient generated data is instrumental in population health management. Connectivity rates have increased immensely in the last five years, pointing at better circumstances for integrated health initiatives, yet meaningful use has not moved much. Connectivity should not be mistaken for continuity.
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Disruptive innovation and transformative tech ruled at HLTHMay 21, 2018With the spotlight trained on new buzzword mechanisms like blockchain and augmented intelligence, disruptive innovation and transformative technologies in healthcare were the subjects of lively debate and discussion at this year’s HLTH conference. Held for four days in early May in Las Vegas, HLTH presented an expansive forum for healthcare professionals, companies, and policymakers to discuss new advances and challenges confronting the healthcare ecosystem. Drawing representation from the healthcare continuum, such as health payment and delivery, the event also offered insights into how the industry could leverage ongoing disruption toward providing next-generation healthcare.
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Healthcare attracts many big tech names at HIMSS 2018March 22, 2018While healthcare as a vertical is not new for most of the world’s largest companies, their brand presence within the industry is significantly increasing. Of course this includes GE, Philips, and Siemens, but also Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for cloud (among other services), Cisco for wireless infrastructure, Qualcomm for electronic vitals capturing, Verizon for patient connectivity to health-related environments, IBM for advanced analytics, and Uber for mobility. And while not exhibiting, Apple should also be included for work on Health Kit, the Cerner collaboration for extending EHR access, and now AC Wellness.
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CES 2018 – More than 700 exhibitors focused on digital health, a $21 billion market in 2021January 17, 2018Digital health was a continuing trend at CES 2018 with 26% of exhibitors having an offering within biometrics, health and biotech, sports and fitness, or wearables. Looking at just companies related to digital health, more than 18% of exhibitors were related to consumer-side healthcare. IHS Markit forecasts the global market for digital health will grow from $15.6 billion in 2017 to $21.6 billion during 2021 at a CAGR of 8.5%, rapidly outpacing the traditional medical equipment markets. While much of the show was an evolution from previous years, including sleep monitoring, embedded sensors in clothing, and wrist-worn activity trackers, a few items incorporated broader technology trends such as machine learning, blockchain, medical-related wearables, and home-based diagnostics.
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American Well and Samsung Health collaboration is great for the industry, but not transformativeApril 21, 2017With the launch of the highly anticipated S8 mobile handset, Samsung also renamed its health platform to “Samsung Health”. Beyond the standard health tracking and lifestyle management features, the company has enabled a deep integration of American Well’s telehealth services in its software. This is somewhat of a milestone for the virtual consultations market. American Well, as a third party service provider, has been available on most mobile platforms for a number of years, but the partnership with Samsung brings a completely new level of exposure – an exposure that should have a positive impact on the overall usage of virtual technology for doctor consultations.
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Remote patient monitoring to include non-medical devicesApril 21, 2017The remote patient monitoring market has yet to reach its full potential, and since its inception, more than two decades ago, the technology has been overhauled on multiple occasions. Another revamp is undergoing right now, as vendors are expanding the ecosystem of devices included in the actual monitoring. Last week, Medtronic Care Management Service announced the integration of Garmin’s activity tracker series, Vivofit, into its remote patient monitoring platform. Meanwhile, iHealth Labs is entering the market after its acquisition of eDevice in September last year. Since the acquisition, the two companies have been working on the so-called “iHealth Next” solution – a combination of iHealth’s suite of devices in conjunction with eDevice’s infrastructure for remote patient monitoring. It is expected that iHealth Next also supports non-medical devices such as activity monitors.
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What happens after self-diagnosis?April 21, 2017The insufficient number of physicians in the world, and growing demand for healthcare services, has led many initiatives that drive the enablement of consumers to self-diagnose at home. Last week, Final Frontier Medical Devices and Dynamical Biomarkers Group went head to head, as the Xprize finalists, competing to create a medical tricorder. Final Frontier Medical Devices came in at the top spot with its DxtER solution, which weighs less than five pounds, but can diagnose 34 health conditions. However, one key question is whether healthcare sectors are ready for self-diagnosis. Surely, the growing level of responsibility from patients will improve patient engagement, but do healthcare sectors have the capacity to attend to self-diagnosed patients, given that these diagnoses are clinically valid?
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Vendor neutral study volumes to reach 7.2 billion during 2021April 13, 2017Many vendor neutral archive (VNA) products are evolving to add functionality that enables advanced workflow capabilities on top of storage and disaster recovery. As data becomes increasingly important to healthcare systems, VNA platforms are bringing together disparate patient information silos to form a more complete longitudinal medical record.
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Consumerism in healthcare is about patients taking responsibility, not ownershipMarch 10, 2017The idea of digital health seems to represent a strong indication towards consumerism in healthcare – a notion that individuals take full ownership of their health, whether that is behavioral such as personal health monitoring, or quite literally e.g. ownership of medical records. Most of this represents little or no value in current time, because consumer ownership of healthcare does not change the engagement with the healthcare sector in any profound way. Surely there may be tons of health data stored somewhere in the care continuum, but it is neither applied in scale or meaningfully, nor is it considered to be so. There a many reasons for this including interoperability issues, workflow misalignment, lack of feasibility given current operational emphasis of healthcare providers, low quality data and many more.
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Digital health presence at Mobile World Congress 2017March 10, 2017Connected health and the Internet of Medical Things (IOMT) have grown its presence in recent years at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This year’s focus was virtual reality (VR) applications in healthcare and the growing ecosystem of peripheral devices used for connected health monitoring.
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Future technologies for old age go beyond the current scope of independent livingMarch 10, 2017Old age certainly brings its challenges in terms of wellbeing and overall health status. It affects the basic independence of people, limiting individuals in a variety of ways, and potentially disabling them in performing certain everyday tasks – that is at least the current perception of reaching old age. Despite creating millions of jobs in eldercare, the rapidly growing portion of the global population aged 65+, is causing a massive disequilibrium in supply and demand, for instance in Japan, where the ratio of an eldercare worker to an elder citizen is 1:4. Japan’s solution to this problem has been deploying robots, the so-called carebots, to serve a number of purposes including mobility, medication management, exercise, conversation and more. Honda, Panasonic and other major corporations are vested in this market.
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Alexa… Am I healthy?January 04, 2017Technology providers are pushing voice assistants to become a bigger part of consumers’ lives, and given the growing connectivity of things, voice assistants is set to play an operator role to give full control to the user. Up until now, voice assistants have been part of consumer electronics whether it is Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Now or Microsoft’s Cortana. These interactive and sometimes intelligent applications are now making their way to healthcare.
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Bose makes hearing aids that aren’t hearing aidsJanuary 04, 2017Bose, the audio equipment company, has developed a new device for better hearing called Hearphones – its first product for the digital health market. Hearphones is a personal sound amplification product (PSAP) and is therefore not a regulated medical device, as opposed to devices marketed as hearing aids. From a technical standpoint, the difference is not significant, but where PSAPs mainly serve the purpose of amplification, hearing aids, a $5 billion market, offer treatment for various types of disabling hearing loss including hearing loss across certain frequency ranges, tinnitus, and more.
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Fitbit in trouble – partnering with Medtronic to increase clinical footprintJanuary 04, 2017The last month of calendar year 2016 was busy for Fitbit. The company announced the acquisition of Pebble – an acquisition to enhance its smartwatch products of the future. More interestingly, from a digital health point of view, a partnership with Medtronic was announced. The partnership focuses on integrating data from Fitbit devices in managing diabetes. Diabetics using Medtronic’s iPro myLog mobile app will be able to take in activity and sleep data from Fitbit devices with the purpose of understanding how these metrics affect overall blood glucose levels. Doing this allows for additional precision of managing diabetes in many ways, including providing better care coordination, adjusting drug dosages, and is also an additional avenue of engagement with the patient. So far in 2017, Fitbit has announced the integration of its devices with Qualcomm Life’s 2net platform to enable UnitedHealthcare Motion members using Fitbit activity monitors.
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As software becomes more intelligent, perhaps clinicians do not need to beDecember 07, 2016An increasing number of people are demanding healthcare services. This increase in demand requires additional clinical staff to process the growing number of patients; however, there remains a lack of qualified personnel in the healthcare industry around the globe. Despite more people entering the healthcare field for employment, the most recent figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) show a shortage of approximately 7.2 million healthcare workers, and this figure is projected to reach as high as 12.9 million by 2035, which shows that the increase in healthcare personnel entering the workforce is insufficient in meeting the surge in demand.
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Advanced Visualization, Virtual Reality and 3D Printing at RSNA 2016December 06, 2016Consumer interest in virtual reality (VR) technology and associated content continued to grow during 2016, with an estimated, forecast installed base of seven million headsets at the end of the year. Entertainment consumption habits, improved technology, inexpensive headwear, and an active start-up community provided a strong environment for VR adoption compared with just two years ago. While the largest category for funding and acquisitions in VR is game development, the medical vertical has also been working to integrate immersive technology. At RSNA 2016, both TeraRecon and EchoPixel were demonstrating integrated advanced visualization software with VR hardware, albeit with different strategies for applying the technologies to healthcare.
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Outpatient growth drives ultrasound equipment volumesNovember 03, 2016The global ultrasound imaging equipment market is estimated to have been worth $6.16 billion in 2015; an increase of 1.2% from 2014. This rate of growth is lower than previously forecast, which is primarily due to the impact of a strong US dollar and other foreign exchange fluctuations, which affected the sales of foreign US subsidiaries. The market also experienced a period of highly competitive pricing which lowered average sales prices (ASP), particularly in Latin America and Europe. For some vendors, this ASP erosion was further exacerbated by the effects of shifting foreign exchange rates. Stronger growth is predicted for 2016 because of new product launches from Carestream, Fukuda Denshi, Hitachi-Aloka, and VisualSonics (Fujifilm SonoSite), and because of increased volumes in point of care and obstetrics applications. On a unit volume basis, shipments were up by 4% over 2014. The results for 2016 are expected to be closer to a 5% increase. Growth in the market through 2020 is being driven by uptake of mid-range and high-end cart-based systems in both emerging and developed markets for use in traditional applications. Uptake will also be bolstered by further development of the use of compact ultrasound systems in point-of-care (POC) applications.
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Mr. Robot and his emerging threat in healthcareOctober 17, 2016In recent years, hackers have increasingly targeted healthcare. A number of these attacks have been ransomware, in which the hacker demands a certain amount of funds to end the hack, while more serious instances have involved gaining access to patient health information – this type of data is becoming more valuable to hackers than banking information, due its perpetual nature. The focus of hackers has always been on accessing data for wide range of purposes, such as national intelligence, identity theft, intellectual property and more.
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Partially subsidizing Apple watches is not the same as giving away activity monitorsOctober 17, 2016- And that is a good thing! Last week, Apple and Aetna announced a partnership that would incentivize the health insurance giant’s members for using an Apple Watch. Yes, the market has seen this model before – a technology company joining forces with a payer to push devices that enable a healthier lifestyle, and further engages consumers of healthcare products and services.
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MACRA, Telemedicine and Walmart - The ATA Fall Forum 2016October 07, 2016The themes of the American Telemedicine Association’s (ATA) 2016 Fall Forum were familiar, but discussed with increased optimism as the long anticipated evolution from traditional healthcare to more efficient provision is well under way. Some of these themes included EMR integration, healthcare as an international business, increased consumer awareness (Walmart and other direct-to-consumer models), innovation from third party vendors, and the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA).
