Using new technologies to improve care

Across the healthcare ecosystem, digital capabilities continue to foster disruptive innovation. For example:

• Surgical robotics is growing for a variety of procedures. Vendors are competing to establish platforms and enabling technologies to deliver increased clinical functionality, operational efficiencies, and better return on investment across the patient journey, as well as to drive patient volume and attract and retain medical talent.
• Payers are using digital care-management tools, such as predictive analytics for population health, to reduce care costs and improve outcomes by pre-empting problems. However, both payers and providers continue to struggle with data interoperability.

Increasing customer engagement

Digital technologies continue to redefine key aspects of healthcare delivery. For example:

• Consumers remain demanding but are increasingly happy to manage their own care with apps, wearables, and telehealth. Healthcare providers agree that these tools improve care efficiency and increase patients’ ownership of their care.
• Better engagement with healthcare providers and patients can be delivered by new digital platforms that enhance commercialization with innovations such as real-time alerts to warn when a patient is likely to switch treatments.

Next-gen trials and treatments

Here, too, digital innovations are having a profound effect across the value chain:

• Consumer interest in personalized medicine and treatments that support existing medicine—for example, apps that support behavioral change. We also see pharmaceutical firms using innovations such as machine learning and data analytics to identify new drug targets at an early research stage
• The trend for virtual medical trials, which accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, is being augmented by new technology, such as advanced analytics, to identify patients and connected devices to improve the process. Further advances and efficiencies are expected.

Central to all these themes is connectivity, which is why MWC is an important event for the healthcare and life sciences sectors.