At a recent conference organized by The Economist, venture capitalist Esther Dyson and FutureMed Executive Director Dr. Daniel Kraft shared some of their thoughts on the state of health and healthcare in 2013. Dyson said that the healthcare system may undergo some changes thanks to changing reimbursement policies but that no dramatic changes should be expected. The real “exciting and dramatic” change will come in what Dyson called “the market for good health”, where user-generated data (quantified self) is a leading trend.
Kraft offered up a number of predictions for 2013 including the rise of inexpensive smart devices like the $35 tablet recently developed in India. Kraft believes physicians will soon begin giving devices like that one away to patients along with prescribed apps that leverage gaming elements to increase patient engagement. Kraft also noted that the fact that we can visit with physicians through our smartphones now is an offering that is going to evolve quickly in 2013.
Research firm InMedica circulated its top ten trends to watch in healthcare for 2013 and digital and mobile health are featured in at least three of them. As we reported recently, InMedica predicts the overall remote patient monitoring market to increase a whopping 55 percent this year, but the firm also expects that casual everyday use activity monitors will overtake high performance heart rate monitors as the most popular kind of wearable device. InMedica also expects to see continued uptake of wireless connectivity in X-ray technology and other medical devices used in healthcare facilities.
In its year-end webinar Manhattan Research said that those looking to develop content for physicians were beginning to pivot from a device-specific strategy to a platform strategy. The research firm said many of its clients were less focused on creating individual apps for individual devices and more about creating personalized services that store most of the information in the cloud. This leads to services that are “optimized across screen flow” since physicians are using smartphones, tablets, and PCs now. Manhattan also shared key metrics that it published during 2012: 85 percent of US physicians are now using mobile devices at work and 39 percent of physicians are communicating with patients via some kind of digital channel.
The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist Walt Mossberg pointed to the growing number of health and fitness tracking devices that launched in 2012 and made a rather safe bet that more are likely this year: “I expect this trend to continue in 2013, in different forms and with more sophisticated sensors,” he wrote before citing Basis as an example.