When’s the digital health revolution going to arrive?
There is no shortage of innovation in healthcare and much of it is digital. The app store and its equivalents are awash with health apps and wearables have well and truly taken off. But there still few established eHealth/digital health players. Why?
Healthcare Europa was at Health2.0 in Barcelona last week finding out about the weird and wonderful gadgets knocking at the door of the healthcare marketplace. That means sitting on smart toilets that monitor hydration and getting trapped in a blockchain hole. Fun all round. From where we’re standing, however, healthcare still looks much the same as it did 20 years ago and few apps or web platforms are taking off.
There are pioneers. The Finnish group Mehiläinen is one to have gotten its hands dirty with digital health and now has six cloud-based applications and 15 in- house programmers. There’s also Babylon Health, a UK-based tech company that as we report this week has raised money for its AI-based diagnostic tools. Both use booking sites, video consultations and EMRs on easy-to-use platforms.
In fact, there are certain functions where digital tools are widely used. But it’s questionable that they represent true disruption in the sense that clinical pathways remain more or less unchanged. Many people at Health 2.0 were also reinventing the wheel: lots of the apps on show did a pretty good job but no better than their tens or even hundreds of competitors on the App Store and its equivalents.
That’s because distribution is a major challenge. Going straight to the end-user, B2C, is inefficient, with customer acquisition costs that exceeded the price of the service for some exhibitors. As for B2B, there were few hospital or other healthcare providers present at this conference and we’re seeing slow take-up there. Start-ups often look to big pharma instead, which has vested interests in keeping patients on pills. The other major B2B route is insurers but often the insured distrust them. As for the medical profession itself, this distribution route is highly fragmented, distrusts apps and is loath to lose control of the patient.
But there’s buckets of innovation out there. You have to sort through a few gimmicks and a great deal of self-promotion to uncover focused tools that do the job they’re designed to, but they’re there. People should pay more attention to this space. That’s why we’ve compiled the best of Health 2.0 here.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Claude Risner or call 0207 183 3779.
