Paraphrasing Ms. Natasha Gulati, Snr. Industry Analyst of Healthcare for the APAC region, targeted innovations will define the future of medical technologies - simply put, innovation trends that are geared towards solving an existing problem rather than for-its-own-sake innovations that organically stem from first principle advancements.
Japan is a very good example of this focus, by impetus of their aging population.
Australia takes it one step beyond the problem-solving domain and seeks a universal improvement by innovating business models around the technological advancements that have already been invested in - this means technology facilitated process reengineerings that grant higher efficiency in similarly targeted outputs.
India on the other hand is looking into the Pareto principle of utilising essential - not necessarily innovative - technologies to serve a larger segment of population as capacity is the catchword for one of the densest and largest human populations in the world, effectively building better and faster healthcare delivery pipelines in a nation where the need is understatedly huge.
Whereas closer to the homefront, Malaysia sees a sure influx of solution providers of individual remote care systems from the US being upscaled to serve remote "customers" on a mass scale not originally intended in the solution's design - so we see that "technological" innovations in the medical arena are not just happening at the level of the core technology itself; but more and more at the level of the business modeling and its intrinsically justifying value proposition, in delivery and access models, as well as targeted outcomes to accompany active, conscious innovation - intelligence built into the very blueprint of the innovative process itself.
The next trend presented by the Frost & Sullivan speaker concerns the marriage between medtech innovation and economic sense - it is succintly called called "frugal innovation" where, as in targeted innovations as mentioned above, this innovation mindset is not just about desired outcome, but about budgetary accommodation as well. This brings a social and realistic dimension to healthcare implementation policies of nations that ascribe to a higher ideal of healthcare delivery but that also subscribe to a practical budget application.
This applies to the macro scale as well as to the micro, individual approach - new solutions need to fit needs that in turn fit the individual user's pocket too.
There is an increasing call for mobile healtcare information systems where practitioners and physicians can access patient data on the go. It seems such a waste that the social cloud of all potential and current "patients" is so huge, no less represented by gargantuan networks ala Facebook, but that the rhythm and pulse of people's needs and health concerns are not tapped in to, to facilitate a higher degree of delivery efficiency. Just as doctors demand information on the go to serve their charges better, so healthcare institutions even from the governmental level should have pertinent intelligence tapped from a socially relevant source.
Healthcare delivery, as we have explored from Ms. Rhenu's Keynote Address, is not only about "treating" a symptom - more so, it should shift towards increasing quality of living and its maintenance before symptoms appear. This thread of "living quality" in actual healthcare delivery can also mean better "entertainment & hospitality" for the patient in their social, cuisinal, and other dimensions where connectedness and availability of choices keep these patients viable and perhaps even productive in the course of their treatment.
This is a win-win paradigm where patient services that facilitate their own lives in treatment interim also increase the healthcare provider's bottom line.
Which brings us to the matter of payment, as the end line of healthcare delivery must also be facilitated by payment platforms that seamlessly bring together personal banking and personal insurance into the healthcare systems' payment platform.
Going back to the social dimension of the healthcare ecosystem, the matter of tapping into the social information sea where every pertinent interaction in it is potentially an intelligence transaction, so patient portals that bring togehter a targeted pool of physician-patient interactions are expected to create immense benefits for treatment technology awareness and even facilitation of pre-diagnosis, pre-treatment procedures.
Indeed, an interconnected web of information readily available to relevant healthcare ecosystem stakeholders is but a description - the implication of this descriptive is potentially a wiki-style mass collaboration netowk that inmproves the entire value chain from early clinical trials to end treatment outcomes.
Big data intelligence systems in a near future where an Internet of Things is an inevitability shall set the stage for the emergence of intelligent healthcare delivery that is optimised at every encompassing level - govermental, commercial, social and personal.
~ Corporate 21 Editorial