Analyst Chat #51: Emerging Technologies in Healthcare - The Underlying Trends

Welcome to the KuppingerCole analyst chat. I'm your host. My name is Matthias Reinwarth. I'm an analyst and advisor at KuppingerCole analysts. And my guest today is Annie Bailey. She's an analyst with KuppingerCole focusing on emerging technologies and she's working out of Stuttgart. Hi Mathias. Thanks for having me back You again, and I'm really looking forward to this. This will be the first in a series of two episodes, and we are focusing on emerging technologies when it comes to healthcare and to new, more modern, more intelligent, more digital solutions in healthcare.

And maybe to start with that, what is driving change in healthcare? What is going on there? Yeah. So we'll see how far I can get, um, into answering this question without mentioning COVID, um, uh, that's obviously a part, but not everything here, which is driving change in health care. One other high-profile measurement for this are the SDGs, the sustainable development goals.

Um, and number three is to ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages. Um, and so this is, uh, an interesting measurement to, to track throughout the years until 2030, when it is, uh, you know, we should theoretically have met the goal To put this into more context. You've mentioned these SDGs, um, where do they come from, um, who is the originator of this, this principle, this international.

So these come from the United nations, and this is a combined effort from the participating nations to determine goals for the, for the development and the betterment of our world as a whole and our society as a whole. Um, and so this is a very high level look at what it means to have a healthy world population.

So again, staying at the high level, some midway reports that have come out, checking the progress on, on achieving the school have shown that there's a big barrier for many countries in achieving this goal. And that is information systems for health services that these information systems are really lacking, but they're not able to share data securely and interoperability between their health institutions, between administrating bureaus. And it's really preventing data driven insights to help achieve this goal of ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing Live in, in Germany.

And we have, there is a quite basic level of infrastructure already in place. We all think that there is room for improvement and this varies with different countries and the FARA you get to, um, to developing countries, the more difficult that might get. But I assume this assessment is really true that we are not yet there to provide an infrastructure that can ensure healthy lives and promote this wellbeing for all at all ages as this principal reads.

Um, but if we look closer to where we live, what is the situation? Yeah, so you're absolutely right.

There's, um, uh, the situation varies from country to country and from region to region from city to city. And, you know, there's no overarching summary of what the health situation is anywhere in the world. But what we, we can say generally is that there's pressure from all sides on the healthcare sector, wherever it finds itself in the world.

Um, and this usually comes from socioeconomic factors, things like aging populations or a growing wealth divide of patients, there's usually a more mobile population, meaning the people are moving to economic centers are further displaced from their social structures, having impacts on mental health, as well as, um, exposure to two very different climate factors, um, which also impact health.

So there are a lot of changes in the demographics of the population, which puts pressure on health systems, but also legislative action as a rural constraint, the free choice of the healthcare sector to act as a business. And you, it's very dependent on the new governmental rule in that region. And so this can dictate the relationship with public and private insurance schemes and much, much more. There's also labor factors. So labor is, is becoming more and more expensive, but that also reveals the, the lack, um, and the deficit of health workers globally.

So this often puts hospitals and other healthcare institutions in a bind of, of having increasing costs and, uh, fewer and more restricted access to qualified healthcare workers. But then in the midst of all of this, there there's the growing opinion that healthcare should remain affordable for all. So how in the world should the healthcare sector react to all of these pressures?

It's, um, a very challenging question. If we look at the, the varying situations that you mentioned also with the discussions currently going on in the United States, when it comes to Medicare for everybody, um, and other countries already having that established, um, there is really a variety of different issues we have to look at and somewhere in between patient privacy and governance. And on the other hand, all the topics that you've mentioned between costs and affordable health care in general.

So there are no magic fixes, but I assume there are with the technology given right now, and the technology that we as analysts are working on a daily basis, there are possibilities out there for, for addressing these issues. So what's, what's going, Yeah. And I would have to echo you technology is never the whole answer.

Um, these are situations which are far more complex than simply plugging in a solution. Um, but, uh, I'm of the opinion that, that technology specifically, some, some of these emerging technologies can play a significant role here. So if we remember back to the, the results of our midway assessment of, of how we are achieving SDG goal, number three, on healthy lives globally, part of that issue in achieving that is not having integrated national health information systems.

Um, and this is a technology issue. So my recent research has been, um, exactly on this and exploring how emerging technologies like AI, like the internet of things or blockchain, and also digital identities, how they will impact the healthcare sector. Right?

So when you've mentioned all, all of those buzz words, technologies already, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and especially close to my heart to digital identities, um, I think that it's really an important factor because nobody is really willing to, to contribute their health data, especially when you are talking about your diseases, your weaknesses into a, an untrusted it system. So I think that is really an important aspect to look at.

But if we look at these technologies that you've mentioned, what are the trends that you discovered when you look at these emerging technologies, especially in this sector of health? Yeah, there's a lot going on.

Um, and it will be really interesting to see how this develops over the next few years, but what has become apparent is that AI powered diagnostics will be a really powerful part of treatments, um, in the near future. So this is already present.

Um, AI is used a lot in really typical treatments, um, using image classification for processing the result of MRIs and cat scans. This is already happening today. And another solution that we see already in use are diagnostic health chatbots, um, using natural language processing, combined with various machine models to help patients self-diagnose for specific health issues, not for everything and help to determine the next steps, if they can do something at home or if they should seek their medical care, what their next steps are.

Uh, so these are really only the beginning of how AI will be used to help diagnose patients and a trend here of course, will be the privacy side, that this will only progress if patients trust the systems to handle their data well, to make sure that there's still compliance or regulations like HIPAA in the U S and also increasing access to care across social economic and geographic lines. So this is one big trend. Another is a, a new ish business model for, uh, the healthcare industry, which is precision health.

So this is a, a model where patient care is completely personalized, um, where you have features like a proactive illness diagnosis, um, or personalized wellness and prevention strategies, the idea of assessing your geology and matching it with a diet, things like this, um, and much more. And so this is already started with things like using smartwatches.

So wearable IOT devices, and using AI supported diagnostics, this will probably be a whole portion of the healthcare industry, which will grow very quickly and another less sparkly, uh, trend, but, um, really, really important is data interoperability between healthcare institutions and also internationally. So the buzzword of the last decade was electronic health records, and these are great, but they're really not enough to really tap into the data insights that would be able to really get the next level of improvement in hospital workflows or assessing patient behavior and health trends.

So we see in a lot of other industries, there's a shift to bringing the user to the center processes, and that will happen here as well, where the patient is brought into the center of processes instead of being centered on one health institution, where you have silos of data being held only in one institution, the patient is moving from a dentist's office to hospital, to private care to the insurance agency in, in this understanding of the patient journey.

Um, the patient has to be the center of this process and the data has to be interoperable and to travel with the patient from all of these institutions. Yeah, I would fully agree because when we put the patient into the center of this process and until the focus of this process, you are, she is really at the core of what's going on when it comes to treatment and to caring for that individual person.

But on the other hand, it's also about managing access control and managing consent to make sure that data is properly used when it comes to maintaining the security and the, and the health of the person.

But on the other hand to allow this information, when consent is given to be processed for additional purposes, as you've mentioned for improving a hospital processes for improving overall statistic information, et cetera, but all this can only happen when it comes to having the person in the driver's seat, the patient in the driver's seat for, um, how this information is actually used afterwards. Would you agree here? Absolutely.

So, um, now that we've learned about these, um, new technology trends that we see in healthcare, we come to the, to the ending of this first part of our podcast episodes, and we will have a look at use cases for these individual technology trends in a second edition that will follow very soon. You've mentioned that you're doing research in that area already. Is there something available already at KuppingerCole dot com that the audience can have a look at while waiting for the second topic? Yes. There's a series that I published called the emerging technology series.

And so I've been able to look at a few different industries up until this point, the financial industry, also, um, energy and utilities. So as you're waiting for the next podcast, you could catch up on those other reports or take a look at the healthcare industry. Okay. So then thank you very much any for, for this first introductory part about what's going on in healthcare, how to achieve these SDG three goals, and we will continue this conversation in an upcoming episode very soon. So for the time being, thank you very much, Annie, and thank you very much to the audience for listening.

Thank you. Bye bye. Bye