Rising cost pressure and need for competitive edge is forcing medical device companies to rely on software innovations to improve their bottom lines. Achieving success in the market has become a challenge for medical device manufacturers in spite of supplying high quality devices. In order to identify the unique selling proposition, manufacturers need to rely on digital technologies to solve the critical healthcare challenges.
Major advances in Internet of Medical things (IoMT), miniaturisation and computing power are scaling the connected devices ecosystem enabling access to zillions of data. IoMT is creating revolutionary disruption in MedTech’s role and relationships within health care. It acts as a key enabler for health care providers to streamline their clinical operations and workflow management, and improve patient care, even from remote locations.
Based on these attributes of MedTech, we analysed the initiatives and opportunities for technology service providers across 3 major themes:
Early detection of diseases:
Detecting chronic diseases prior to their progression to decrease patient fatality is the forefront agenda of every healthcare provider. Dynamic entry of AI and predictive analytics in medical imaging technologies have revolutionized how doctors utilize images. Wearables and gene profiling techniques are helping to detect even the minute symptoms for chronic diseases.
- MedTech giants like ThermoFisher are collaborating with tech-giants like Samsung to develop solutions for Cardiac problems, Sepsis, etc.
- Startups like Zilic are actively expanding their machine learning capabilities to achieve advancements in Anomaly detection.
Targeted personal care:
Tailoring medical decisions according to the patient’s response or risk of disease is highly critical to achieve rapid cure. Companies are using Precision medicine and Genomics to provide more targeted services with use cases like Precision medicine and drug-delivery systems.
- Medtronic teamed up with Viz.ai to identify and triage potential large vessel occlusion (LVO) strokes, and automatically notify specialists
- Precision medicine innovations are being accelerated by start-ups and niche providers like Fasttrack Diagnostics, Syapse, etc.
Remote patient monitoring:
Leveraging remote monitoring technologies to Increase access to care and decreasing healthcare delivery costs. Smart pills, smart monitoring devices and telehealth solutions are prominent technologies of this space.
- American Well, Proteus and Sanofi are some of the major remote care solution providers attracting investments from major MedTech giants.
- Google’s Verily has been one of the active players in this space scaling capabilities across Vital monitoring and medical adherence solutions
Medical device players are looking to accelerate their data analytics capabilities for faster deployment of MedTech solutions. Services providers that can support in data warehousing towards areas of imaging devices, monitoring data etc. are key use case enablers. Developing and upgrading apps to remotely monitor the patients’ metrics and designing & implementing software to analyse data from sensors and wearables are key offerings for medical device companies.
