Healthcare technology companies have undoubtedly sprung into the spotlight during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the world almost at a standstill during this ‘new normal,’ medical startups have revingorated the discussion around how modern-day health solutions should look.

Our smartphones can do more than games and social media. The rapid digitalization drive in the last few years across industries has made mHealth one of the most sought-after sectors in the market.

Healthcare is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, and rightly so – standards are necessary to keep people safe and healthy. Yet for startups it means that entering the market and competing with incumbents can be exceptionally difficult, and innovation has suffered as a result. 

In recent years, it became obvious that the current healthcare ecosystem is not sustainable.

The pandemic outbreak has put the healthcare sector to a real test and pushed its innovation and operational capabilities to the limit. The whole world counts on healthcare businesses to come up with solutions that will ease the serious health consequences caused by COVID-19. While some companies focus on developing diagnostic measures to help the pandemic spread, others focus on vaccine development. 

The use of chatbots has exploded in recent years. Companies are taking advantage of these AI-powered virtual agents to automate routine processes and give consumers round the clock attention in areas like customer service, payments, and marketing. And now, chatbots are set to make a mark on the healthcare industry.  According to analysis by Crunchbase, more than $800 million has been invested across at least 14 known startups developing a health chatbot offering.

The key to the successful implementation of digital healthcare solutions is patient engagement. Without mutual trust between healthcare providers and patients, even the most sophisticated technological solutions won’t improve patients’ medical outcomes. We gathered experts from across digital healthcare – both from dynamic startups like Keto-Mojo, as well as enterprises like Roche – and with this patient-centered approach in mind, discussed the essential aspects of patient engagement:

Healthcare software solutions development in 2020 and beyond The digital healthcare market is booming – in its 2019 report, Acumen anticipates that the market will reach a whopping $511 billion by the year 2026. Hence, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the future for digital medicine and remote healthcare looks bright.

Current healthcare trends (described in detail in our previous article) suggest several paths that telemedicine may take in the long term. New developments in AI technology and big data analysis allow for automation and improvement in areas such as:

The global healthcare market is changing, along with healthcare costs and patient demographics. The overall healthcare spending is expected to rise at a CAGR of 5% between 2019 and 2023 and the market’s predicted value for 2020 is more than $2 trillion. Because of this growth and a number of emerging challenges, healthcare needs to leverage innovative solutions to meet the needs of patients. Let’s take a look at the major technological trends shaping the industry in 2020.

Will telemedicine applications become the new normal? In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, more medical practitioners and health organizations worldwide are rushing to adopt telemedicine solutions. According to Ray Dorsey, director of the Center for Health and Technology at the University of Rochester, the number of virtual patient consultations in the US increased tenfold within two weeks (in comparison to the pre-COVID-19 situation). Kaiser Permanente, the health maintenance organization, managed to reduce in-person visits to its specialty doctors by 40% thanks to the use of telemedicine.  

Telemedicine uses the internet to connect patients and care providers, allowing for more immediacy, convenience, and personalization of healthcare services. It introduces new possibilities to traditional healthcare systems, which affects the popularization of telemedicine and other areas of telehealth.

The healthcare software landscape According to a 2019 industry forecast by Meticulous Research, the healthcare IT market is expected to grow at 13.8% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) between 2019 and 2027, to reach a value of $511 billion. 

With the rapid spread of COVID-19, healthcare in many countries has been stretched to its limit. A number of medics have already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and countless more continue to risk that they contract and spread the disease on a daily basis when providing care. Minimizing contact between patients and frontline staff is critical, but it’s also a significant challenge for healthcare providers to achieve.

Machine learning solutions have been used in healthcare for decades, but they only became popular a few years ago, mostly due to developments in deep learning. According to PwC, in the next four years, the market for AI in healthcare will grow from $760 million to $6 billion.

The AI-powered solutions have a massive potential in healthcare. Computers equipped with software based on convolutional neural networks are better at detecting skin cancer than experienced dermatologists, and Deep Learning beats radiologists in diagnosing pneumonia.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring more benefits to healthcare than to any other industry. However, until recently the progress here has been slower than in other fields - such as finance or e-commerce. Luckily, this has changed lately. With significant investments, we can see an outburst of machine learning applications that should lead to medical revolutions in many fields.

In healthcare, getting the diagnosis right – and getting it in time – is key to any successful treatment. It’s a matter of utmost importance, as revealed in the research on postmortem examinations: diagnostic errors are responsible for about 10% of patient deaths in total. The study also suggests that these errors contribute to 6-17% of all adverse events in hospitals.

Peter John and Steve Dailey are founders of Helpr, a facilitating platform that aims at improving the personal healthcare services market in the UK. Helpr connects care workers directly with people looking for their services. The providers earn up to 66% more than in the traditional British care system, while the clients pay up to 20% less for their services. The project is run as a social enterprise and prioritizes quality of service over profit. Peter and Steve told us how they business has been going.