Healthcare Trends: Facts and Numbers
The topic of future trends in healthcare industry is prosperous. The increasing implementation of digital solutions sets new technology trends in healthcare industry. In particular, in more than 50% of cases, the European healthcare service consumers actively respond to the current digital healthcare trend for using diverse apps:
- to monitor their health
- to measure their fitness level
- to make a follow-up appointment
- to refill drug prescriptions
- to share health-related data with their doctors.
The current healthcare digital trend for more transparency in shaping the healthcare consumer experience determines the market expansion, which is forecast to increase from $25.39 billion registered in 2017 to more than $60 billion in 2023.
Healthcare Technology Trends 2023
Technology trends in healthcare today and in the new decade are highly likely to be driven by the concept of digitally-enabled health.
Digital health trends include healthcare delivery and health prevention that are built around AI-powered technologies and diagnostics based on a personalized approach, which globally means implementation of virtual health assistance and accelerated use of digital healthcare tools and apps.
According to experts on digital health, the specific areas that promise to boom in the 2020s, include the following.
FemTech
Nowadays, more women decide to start their own journey on exploring technologies designed for female health. That is why FemTech is is one of the main current technology trends in healthcare. The industry revenue, by experts’ estimations, is expected to reach $50 billion by 2025.
Image Source: CBINSIGHTS
Indeed, the women apps known under the popular business category of FemTech have been on the rise for a while. It encompasses a variety of products and technologies to address the needs of females’ health. The market offers a range of solutions in the field of training and fitness, sleep management, period tracking, fertility treatment, pills prescription, data analytics for identifying the risk factors of female health.
The development of this healthcare trend suggests that the ecosystem of female health can be expected to encompass remote monitoring solutions, apps for care diagnostics, and wider usage of telehealth technologies tailored to women’s needs.
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Over the recent years, the versatility of digital technologies made AI in healthcare a current health technology trend. The significant increase of innovations in the artificial intelligence market in healthcare is likely to prevail as a trend as the market value expects to reach $190.61 billion by 2025. Total digitalization and the transition to the cloud make AI one of the current trends in medicine.
AI demonstrated a huge potential of delivering healthcare solutions by taking two consecutive steps:
- creating algorithmically generated data
- applying it relevantly for the specific patient’s needs.
Not intended to replace clinicians and medical professional practitioners, AI in healthcare serves the purpose of enhancing the human interaction within healthcare service delivery. It is of special value when it comes to decision support, patient triage, and image analysis.
According to the latest reports:
Early adopters of artificial intelligence solutions are beginning to see success in clinical areas such as predicting readmissions and avoidable emergency department visits
Wearable Tech
The diversity of fitness apps and wearable technology devices aligns with the upward healthcare technology trend for continuous health assessment.
The fitness app market is evaluated by expected growth to $1.68 billion by 2021-2025. Fitness apps demonstrate the high effectiveness for lifestyle monitoring in regard to:
- maintaining exercise routine
- supporting weight loss
- keeping healthy diet
- checking nutrition indexes
- activity tracking.
The market for wearable devices operates on delivering diagnostics and therapeutics solutions. The latter segment is projected to increase significantly by expanding the usage of therapeutic tools for asthma management, pain-relieving, and insulin level monitoring.
Overall, this segment of wearables covers the pain management, rehabilitating process, and apps for the respiratory system. Insulin monitoring for patients with a diabetes health condition is expected to have the biggest share of consumers. That is why wearable devices are one of the main trends in healthcare technology.
Telemedicine
The market of telemedicine apps encompasses a wide range of solutions from virtual consultancy to the transmission of digital images, making it one of the current trends in healthcare. One of the reasons why telemedicine is one of the latest trends in healthcare technology is its popularity in rural and remote areas where telehealth technologies bring significant changes and elevate customer satisfaction to a new level, making it one of the greatest healthcare technology examples.
Telehealth enables the connectivity of medical practitioners and patients by timely recording and sharing medical data, which helps in the prevention of high-risk medical conditions by identifying the areas of concern at an early stage. Overall, telemedicine apps can successfully address the issues of:
- wait time management
- follow-up appointments
- minimizing the hospital readmission rate.
Telemedicine is widely utilized through video conferencing for remote diagnostics and consultations and conducting video training for fostering medical tele-education.
Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality in Healthcare
Favored by 3.4 million healthcare users worldwide, the virtual and augmented reality apps have brought considerable changes to two major healthcare fields:
- Delivering healthcare service
- Medical students training.
With augmented reality healthcare technologies, health service providers can deliver optimal care solutions to patients with depression, eye impairment, and other complicated health conditions on a new level. Implementing augmented and virtual reality in extreme cases might be the only scenario to cater to specific needs without causing patient harm.
Medical students also get vast opportunities in training through implementing augmented and virtual reality in navigating human anatomy, conducting analysis, and simulating virtual interaction in a more immersive mode.
Personalization
The solutions delivering personalized healthcare are expected to maintain their popularity due to the expansion of the wearables market. Gathering biometric data is crucial for providing care via wearables. Taking an approach for personalization in healthcare gives access to such important domains as verification, management, and control of patient data.
Personalization also implies medical measurement and tailored medical treatment that can be implemented through diverse options:
- personalized care delivered by ‘doctor on demand’
- concierge service to assist patients with nonclinical needs
- DNA test procedures to build a personalized portfolio of the patient’s genetic makeup
- personalized communication of relevant data to new mothers.
Concluding thought
Technology in healthcare is definitely changing our lives today. A new decade promises to be rich in emerging top healthcare technology trends that embody the concept of providing personalized care and regard for specific patient’s needs within the seamless doctor-patient interaction experience.
The digital trends in healthcare that are expected to prevail and become mainstream include augmented and virtual reality, AI solutions, wearables, telehealth apps implementation, and female health apps.
If you have an idea of developing a medical app that might change the healthcare digital environment and drive the patients’ or medical professionals’ experience to a new level you will need a customized solution that can be implemented by a software development company with a strong project portfolio.
The experts of our company will consult you on details pertaining to your prospective project, the time of its implementation, and the price options.
The healthcare industry is developing very rapidly. The main trends in this industry are the increasing introduction of AI, VR, and AR solutions, as well as expanding the scope of telemedicine and wearable devices implementation.
The main changes were brought by 2020-2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic. From now on, telemedicine and digital health solutions aren't something industry-specific and being used by a large number of people everywhere.
The two main problems of the healthcare industry today are the provision of personalized service for patients and maintaining a high level of sensitive data security.
