Healthcare Market Opportunities

The global healthcare market is growing at an unprecedented rate. Over the past decade, advances in technology and medical treatments have revolutionized the industry, allowing for the development of new treatments, therapies, and technologies. As a result, the global healthcare market is expected to grow to a staggering $4.95 trillion by 2026.

Growth Factors

This growth can be attributed to several factors, including increased access to healthcare services in emerging markets and an increasing focus on preventive care. In addition, advancements in digital health technology are also contributing to this growth, as they make it easier for providers to monitor patient data remotely and quickly respond to changes in their conditions or develop treatments that are tailored specifically to them.

Future Expansion

These developments will likely lead to further market expansion in the coming years. To capitalize on this opportunity, stakeholders must ensure that they are actively participating in innovation and leveraging existing trends such as artificial intelligence (AI) integration and big data analytics. As the U.S. population ages, needing more healthcare services, strong market opportunities are emerging for innovative companies, from creating "find a medical service" apps, to caregiver management and inter-organizational information exchange.

Leveraging Opportunities

Of course, companies need to continue investing in research and development efforts related to precision medicine, predictive diagnostics and personalized therapies that can provide better outcomes for patients while simultaneously driving industry growth. But at the same time, consumer-facing technologies, such as patient portals and "find a provider" services need to acquire and deploy accurate healthcare provider information, covering many tens of millions of rows of provider data that is updated constantly.

Companies that sell advanced products to hospitals, physician offices, clinics and other businesses also need provider information to infuse their campaigns with contact information and business intelligence. The U.S. healthcare industry is aggressively competitive, and business intelligence is jealously guarded. The job of finding the information is challenging, and companies like CarePrecise are dedicated to just that task.

Conclusion

To be successful, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the market dynamics and leverage existing trends such as AI integration and big data analytics. Equally important is having accurate healthcare provider information - which can be effectively provided by companies like CarePrecise. Using these resources, businesses will be able to reach out to healthcare decision makers with their messages.

By engaging with these strategies now, stakeholders will be able to take full advantage of the rapidly expanding healthcare market – which is set to become one of the most lucrative industries of our time.

COMING: Standard Quality Measures

The Obama administration, acting in concert with the health insurance trade group America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), announced today an agreement to develop a standardized set of healthcare quality measures for physicians. In particular, the new quality measurement system will track care given by accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes, primary care physicians, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, HIV and hepatitis C care providers, medical oncologists, orthopedists, obstetricians and gynecologists.

As physician's pay from insurance plans is more and more tied to quality outcomes - did the patient get well, or will there be additional claims down the road? - a system for measuring outcomes has become necessary. In recent years, government and private health plans have been working separately, and a confusing array of different measures for different companies has been growing. The CMS/AHIP agreement will seek to create a single standard system of measurement, relieving much of the burden caused by separate systems. In their news release, acting CMS administrator Andy Slavitt stated that "this agreement today will reduce unnecessary burdens for physicians and accelerate the country's movement to better quality." Representatives of the American Medical Association and the Americal Academy of Family Physicians praised the effort.

Healthcare Reform Brews Startup Gold

As state and federal insurance exchanges struggle to open their portals to millions of new insureds, the Affordable Care Act is spawning myriad opportunities for startup entrepreneurs in the healthcare IT space.

The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009 handed physicians generous incentives to invest in healthcare information technology. Unprecedented investment has been finding its way to to electronic medical record (EMR) vendors. Use of these systems has exploded, roughly doubling since 2012.

That other familiar new legislation, the Affordable Care Act, affectionately dubbed "Obamacare," seems to be awakening the sleeping giant of American capital investment, as the largest growth in the history of healthcare insurance is being launched this month. Private exchanges have offered one such opportunity, but many more are on the horizon, as healthcare providers turn to technology to cope with increases in patient services, and as new providers hang out their shingles to capture the burgeoning patient market. Coupled with the aging of the Baby Boom generation, healthcare industry fortunes have never looked so good.

Remote patient monitoring tools, including wearable sensor/transmitters, represents one of the early forays for startups. Mobile devices will monitor patients and report bio data to patients' healthcare provider teams. As the ACA changes the game from the existing volume-based model to a value-based revenue system, physicians will no longer have an incentive to order a flurry of expensive tests, but to maintain a 360-degree view of patients' health, catching threats while intervention is relatively less costly, and to prevent hospital re-admissions by remote monitoring of biometrics during at-home recovery and on an ongoing basis. Federal incentives to treat patients under outpatient conditions will be an initial major driver. A recent estimate by Rock Health pegs recent investment in this technology at $102 million.

MedTronic, a manufacturer of mobile insulin delivery technologies, recently announced FDA approval of its new "artificial pancreas," a mobile device that combines automated constant glucose testing with insulin delivery. The device, already in use in Europe, collects and can report patient blood glucose levels and insulin pump interventions on a minute-to-minute basis, and will be rolling out in the U.S. over the next year. The device does not yet transmit data, but must be downloaded.

Fitness-tracking devices are among the new direct-to-consumer devices finding acceptance in the market. Some see this development as helping to bring down the cost of mobile biometrics, and providing the data stream needed to feed the emerging preventive care and early intervention movement. The presence of such technology in the consumer market could ease consumer acceptance of more clinically-oriented mobile technologies related to population health management, a potentially enormous new segment in the industry.

Population health management encompasses tools and expertise to capture and analyze vast streams of biometric data and broader patient health information in order to identify trends that threaten particular populations. Hospitals are the current market for these tools, but new markets can be imagined among outpatient services providers of many types, in supply chain management, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, as well as government-based public health entities.

New ways of delivering primary and specialty care represent another area of growth. Concierge clinics, and clinics that cater to niche patient populations make heavy use of technology in acquiring and keeping patients, frequently commanding higher fees than broader-based clinics.

The emerging "maker community" also represents a new force in the healthcare technology and medical device development markets. New technologies that democratize the prototyping of new technologies, utilizing $35 computers, smart phones and inexpensive 3D printing, are attracting record numbers of individual inventors to the once-stodgy healthcare industry dominated by huge conglomerates like GE and 3M. What healthcare will look like after the coming boom is anyone's guess, but it will almost certainly involve more people applying more intelligence and effort to our health, and, as their achievements emerge, so may vast new wealth.

CarePrecise provides data products to the healthcare IT market, and marketing tools to vendors of health IT, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, including numerous startups.