Over the last 5 years, big tech has massively increased its healthcare investment: 12 times more healthcare-related mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, or ventures took place! By 2030, healthcare will look entirely different than what we have seen over the past decade.
We are predicting a fundamental shift from sickcare to healthcare. What does that mean? Digital Detection & Diagnosis as well as preventive and personalized health solutions are going to be implemented seamlessly into the daily lives of patients. Everything will be powered by code, algorithms, and data.
Treatments for patients are going to be highly individualized and based on data from wearables, sensors, and digital applications that track habits and patterns. The healthcare landscape is going to change drastically – smaller players like start-ups can enter a market that was reserved for big pharma but also participants that are more related to tech than to healthcare will establish themselves as important market participants. Specialized skills are going to be what you need to be successful as a start-up.
For patients, this is good news. Digital health applications and digital diagnosis tools and gadgets are already making healthcare more transparent for patients today. Data does not always need to be analyzed by a doctor but can also be processed automatically by algorithms and be served to clients on a silver plate.
The relationships between caregivers and patients are going to be more direct than before because health practitioners can work more closely on the patient with all the digital tools they are using.
Digital healthcare applications are already now ready for reimbursement and on an incline in terms of usage. They enable more and more individualized treatments for patients. There are more trends that lead towards individualized healthcare solutions: real-world-evidence data that is collected from users on platforms like https://medwatcher.io are enabling data-based recommendations and predictions for individual patients.
Wearables are probably one of the biggest impacts on personalized medical care. All big tech companies nowadays are having some sort of wearable in their pipeline. Fitbit got acquired by Google not just because they want to have watches – Google knows the value of the data that is collected with wearables very well.
Let us take a look at what 2030 could look like and what this will mean for pharma and biotech. First of all, it needs to be stated, that big tech is going to have the most important role in this scenario – which is indicative of the modern world order we live in. Digital solutions are ruling nearly every industry.
Start-ups are going to shape the future of health more than biopharma companies. Still: Biopharma knows that a change is coming. PWC Strategy& did a survey and got the following results:
The 25% mentioned in the last bullet point are those companies which are currently already screening the market for potential tech start-ups to acquire and cooperate with to make sure not to be late to the party – or not being invited at all.
While big pharma is trying to stay on the ball, big tech is investing in healthcare like never before. Indeed, five of the biggest tech companies — Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Tencent — collectively filed more than 3,500 healthcare patents in the five-year period up to and including 2019 year-to-date.
For everyone else, time is now running out to be creative and test strategies. The future of healthcare will definitely be exciting, full of opportunities and new competition.
We are excited to see where this development will lead to, as we are all potential patients benefitting from the developments in digital health.
Aescuvest’s mission is to lift great ideas and companies into their next stage and catapult the digital health start-up scene towards new heights. We do not want to miss out on the next opportunities. We believe that there is a redistribution of market power coming that will create many losers and many winners – we want to be on the right side! Standing still is not an option for ANYONE these days.