2020's Digital Health Trends To Look Out For

As we welcome a new year, we’re bound to come across new developments in the field of digital health that will reshape its landscape. At The Medical Futurist, we aim at providing useful directions to key stakeholders and digital health enthusiasts alike regarding those digital health trends that are worthy of your attention. 

As such, we have made a comprehensive list of 12 trends that are likely to take place during the year. We are thrilled to present our findings in our e-book, Top Trends In Digital Health In 2020, published today! We’ll give you a taste of what to expect out of this e-book by sharing 5 of those 12 trends below. 

1. Amazon will reveal their full scale electronic medical record system to care for their employees.

If you’ve been following Amazon’s leaps in digital health, this trend won’t sound far-fetched to you. The company’s 1492 health tech lab has been working under tight wraps on some big secretive project if its related meetings, investments and recruitment are anything to go by. And if you still weren’t convinced, then its pilot Amazon Care program launched in 2019 for its employees should do the trick. 

Source: https://amazon.care/

Given these trends, we expect Jeff Bezos’ company to unveil a full scale electronic medical record system to supplement its Amazon Care program. The company’s A.I. technology like Amazon Rekognition Video, Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend could become integral parts of this system so as to offer telemedicine services to its employees. On top of this, a medically-oriented Alexa could be added to the mix, test running it with Amazon’s employees to advise users on mild conditions at home, without the need to see a doctor.

2. Google will launch a new line of trackers because of the Fitbit acquisition.

Google’s shock move to acquire Fitbit won’t be for naught, especially considering the tech giant’s low presence in the fitness industry. Google’s past efforts in the said industry like the Google Fit app and its $40M purchase of Fossil haven’t resulted in much. On the other hand, getting Fitbit on board, a company that boasts over 27 million active users and nearly 90 million devices sold worldwide, gives Google a much needed boost in the fitness industry race. Launching a Google-Fitbit device will be the next logical outcome with the search company having a significant share in the fitness market.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/

Such an acquisition and an eventual new device play well into Google’s ongoing plans as well. The company’s Verily’s Project Baseline depends on reliable hardware and a significant number of potential participants as soon as possible for its studies to gain steam, and Fitbit’s acquisition offers exactly that. 

Google’s strides in the fitness market might also help drive competition forward with companies like Amazon and Facebook making similar acquisitions and offering competitive products and services.

3. An A.I. startup using A.I. for drug design decided to become a pharma company and run the trial themselves.

A.I. startups and big pharma collaborations for drug design are quite common. Those A.I. companies provide the simulation technology and computational models for a drug’s development, while the pharma company sees the project till completion. However, this collaboration often comes to a close as soon as the project ends and the A.I. startup no longer has any say on the drug’s fate. There are quite a few promising startups like these which might want to get more involved in a drug’s design and development.

The easiest way for them to do so is to bypass collaborating with pharma companies by becoming pharma companies themselves. In this way, they will be able to see the drug’s progress from conception to fruition. We expect to see at least one such transformation during 2020.

4. A 5G application will be deployed in a healthcare setting

As mobile carriers launch their 5G services this year and the proper infrastructure to support and propagate the technology gets laid out, we’re likely to see at least one practical setting in healthcare. With its higher bandwidth and lower latency, 5G will enable numerous inventions and practical uses like truly immersive virtual reality platforms and telesurgery to come to fruition.

Source: www.digitaltrends.com

We’ve already seen a couple of examples in England and China, where the technology was used for remote surgery. We expect to see the trend get picked up by at least one US healthcare provider, whose service, powered by 5G, will be faster and more reliable, and hence more competitive.

5. At least 5 countries will follow Germany's and Denmark's example in officially embracing digital health.

In our article assessing national digital health strategies, we couldn’t find a single flaw in Denmark’s strategy. The Danish government’s clear vision and calculated steps set an example for others to follow. Germany has been making serious moves to turn itself into the digital health reference in Europe with its plans like equipping all insured patients with electronic health records and tightening data security. Following in those countries’ footsteps, there will be at least 5 countries which will push forward digital health strategies.

While there are other notable examples in national digital health strategies, we speculate that other countries will follow the trend. This will be driven by the fact that the countries taking the lead will continue doing so, unless the rest also enter the race and announce their very own national policies. These policies will be specific to digital health and will resemble those put forward by Germany and Denmark but tailored for each countries’ local context.

If any of those trends caught your attention, then we encourage you to dive deeper into our e-book’s full version of each trend. You will also find others that relate to A.I. policy recommendation, at-home blood testing and smart mirrors. However, we would like to point out that each trend should be regarded as a milestone. While some of our predicted trends might manifest during the course of 2020, others might not. 

Nevertheless, our aim is to provide useful directions while making those predictions as precisely as possible. Check out the ebook here!

We also welcome your feedback and own projected digital health trends for 2020. Feel free to share them on our social media channels!

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is a keynote speaker and an Amazon Top 100 author.

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