Digital health & MedTech: New signals for transformation

In brief

• Globally, healthcare is experiencing increasing pressure and disruption, from affordability challenges to shifting patient expectations.
• Care is expanding from hospitals to ambulatory and at-home care, but the industry remains at the beginning stages of having the capabilities to meet this shift.
• MedTech must find an approach that reflects and benefits from the speed of transformation now enabled by digital innovation.
• We discovered five trends that can help MedTech companies mature and scale their capabilities to thrive in this new paradigm of Digital Health.

Digital health & MedTech: New signals for transformation

MedTech companies are best positioned to lead the transformation in Digital Health thanks to their unique understanding of therapeutics, patients and providers. Growth is being driven by the increasing popularity of digital devices, many of which are already in the hands of consumers. However, without the right digital foundation to support these companies internally, digital insights will be difficult to leverage to create a comprehensive Digital Health solution.

To understand the key challenges facing life sciences professionals when expanding, we interviewed over 30 C-Suite leaders and MedTech senior executives and Pharma in AdvaMed’s Digital Health Center of Excellence. In addition, we surveyed 150 MedTech senior executives globally and analyzed over 100 M&A deals and over 600 product launches. Our surveys and analyses were from a subset of MedTech companies and took place between January 2019 and May 2022.

Through our research, we found that five key trends are driving future growth:

1. The consumer patient: Patients have become the consumers and are actively demanding and receiving healthcare consistent with their broader expectations for non-healthcare.
2. Care anywhere, everywhere: As the Consumer Patient demands care anywhere and everywhere, healthcare is increasingly expanding from hospitals to ambulatory and at-home care.
3. The rise of digital: The Digital Health agenda has become a priority for the C-Suite to continuously generate insights and expand services and products throughout the patient care continuum.
4. Converging sectors: Digital Health is fueling non-traditional deals, with various sectors converging to develop products and services across the entire care pathway.
5. New regulatory pathways: Digitization of health may fall outside the bounds of established regulatory pathways for untested technologies, requiring new approaches from the sector.

Digital Health sits at the convergence of medicine and technology. It is governed by a number of different regulatory and legal frameworks and working groups within governing bodies. MedTech executives ranked regulatory uncertainty as a barrier and agreed that it has an impact on their Digital Health agenda. Stakeholders need to be working in regulatory spaces they are less comfortable in—or in some cases work with the regulatory body to develop new guidance.

By understanding the barriers currently facing healthcare, companies will be able to build better strategies. They can create a more effective, affordable and innovative paradigm in which the level of care is not only sustainable but continues to improve across the entire ecosystem.

MedTech offers value through accessibility, critical insights for both patients and physicians, and, very likely, improved costs. As companies become more outcome-oriented through digital adoption, reimbursement models need to shift to incentivize healthcare stakeholders to pursue more digital health solutions to ease barriers and support the consumer patient.

Our research shows MedTech will shape the future of digital health.