Exciting time for digital health players

Digital Health has gained much importance, development and investment in the last decade. The year 2019, continued the strong upward trend in health innovation funding. With $13.7 billion in total funding across 727 deals, and was the second most-funded year ever, according to Startup Health. Boasting three out of 2019’s top 10 most-funded cities, China cemented its place as a hub for health innovation, and is positioned for continued growth. The last decade saw the emergence of telemedicine, Big Data, disruption in consumer wellness and healthcare, etc. As the digital health industry matures, there will be new challenges pertaining to data privacy, regulations, digital medicines, etc. Let’s look at the possibilities for digital health in the coming decade.

- Ayesha Siddiqui

The global digital health market was valued at $ 144.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach a value of $393.3 billion by 2024, registering a CAGR of around 18 per cent during 2019-2024, according to the IMARC Group. The digital health market is slowly maturing from a sector dominated by early-stage start-ups to more established companies with validated products. 2019 was marked with the IPOs of several digital companies, some were acquired by Big Tech, and others partnered with Pharma firms from automating clinical trials to drug discovery. Analysis from Rock Health indicates that investments in digital healthcare in 2019 are keeping pace with investments that were made in 2018. While the total number of deals seems likely to stay consistent with 2018, the average size of the deals has increased.

Privacy is paramount

In the recent times, there has been increasing number of hacking-related to healthcare whether it’s WannaCry in 2017 which affected hospitals throughout the world or SingHealth’s (Singapore’s largest group of healthcare institutions) database containing patient personal particulars and outpatient dispensed medicines had been the target of a major cyber-attack in July 2018. These instances have put light on the privacy challenges these smart technologies bring. The privacy concern also cast a dark show over the growth of digital health industry.

Moving forward, digital healthcare companies will have to establish increasingly tight security, stringent privacy policies, and provide more transparency around data use.

Big Tech is big