Frost & Sullivan revealed that healthcare leaders are convinced that four digital technologies, including wearables, mobile health (mHealth), big data analytics and artificial intelligence, would be game changers in 2019.
The market research company forecasts using artificial intelligence that the healthcare IT applications market will hit $1.7 billion by the close of 2019, increasing at 68.5% of compound annual growth rate all through 2022.
“AI-powered IT tools that manage payers’ and providers’ business risks in clinical, operational, financial, and regulatory settings will especially find high uptake,” claimed Kamaljit Behera, the analyst for Frost & Sullivan Transformational Health Industry.
Frost & Sullivan is looking forward to the healthcare big data analytics market reaching $68 billion by 2020 as providers continue to use additional specialty-specific products.
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Some of the critical segments include personal emergency response systems, mHealth platforms, Telehealth, and remote patient monitoring devices.
By the close of 2019, Frost & Sullivan anticipates that the global healthcare market will surpass $1.96 trillion.
A maximum of 15% of healthcare spending will be channeled towards value-based care ideas.
In turn, this undertaking will result in an increment of risk-sharing contracts, especially between providers and device and drug manufacturers, increasing business value for providers.
Blockchain is one technology that is least expected to have any significant impact on healthcare in 2019.
Kamaljit said: “Blockchain in healthcare is slowly starting to migrate from pilot proof of concept (PoC) to early commercial implementations.”
Arielle Trzcinski, a senior research analyst at Forrester Research, concurs that healthcare blockchain will not take off in 2019.
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“We think blockchain is overhyped. What we find is organizations using blockchain just to be able to say they are using blockchain. They are not necessarily tapping into the power of blockchain in terms of security and transparency,” Trzcinski said
“Many healthcare pilot projects are not necessarily leveraging the core infrastructure of blockchain. They are saying, ‘We are using blockchain for this thing. Isn’t it cool and sexy?’ But you don’t need blockchain for some of these things,” she said.
Mutaz Shegewi, the director of IDC Health Insights, said: “Increasingly, the healthcare industry is becoming more pragmatic in terms of what blockchain can and can’t offer. It is a promising technology. It holds a lot of opportunities to unleash untapped value in stagnant, siloed data reserves. That comes from its properties—an immutable, distributed ledger.”
He added, “There are consortiums being formed. There is increasing commercialization of blockchain that is being piloted and implemented. There are a number of companies that have issued offerings through blockchain that tie to patient engagement using gamification to improve their care.”
Shegewi is convinced that artificial intelligence will have a significant impact on healthcare in 2019. “Radiology is the best example we have of the impact of AI. We are starting to see medical device manufacturers embed AI technology that allows radiologists to do their job better and more conveniently.”
“There is also an interesting application of AI in the clinical documentation and workflow. We are seeing vendors introducing algorithms for population health. Another advanced application of AI we’ve seen recently is embedding virtual assistants to facilitate clinical documentation and workflow similar to how we would use Siri on our Apple phones to perform various functions,” he said.
