Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, forecasts that 2020 will be an unforgiving but transformational year for the healthcare industry. As the world grapples with a global emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry is expected to witness a drop in growth from 5.3% to 0.6% in 2020, with revenues remaining below the $2 trillion mark.
"While the life sciences segment seems to be surviving and thriving, in certain scenarios, medical technologies and imaging are expected to be hit the hardest. Elective procedures being on hold and delayed or prolonged procurement of capital equipment will have a negative impact on revenue, from $413.9 billion to $377.1 billion for medical devices and from $31.5 billion to $18.1 billion for imaging equipment,” said Frost & Sullivan’s Transformational Health Program Manager. “Additionally, with telehealth transforming care delivery and health IT enhancements in analytics and interoperability, digital health will continue to thrive at a growth rate of 7.9% in 2020.”
He added: "While the short-term demand for testing and the race to find a vaccine intensifies, governments are reallocating budgets to finance healthcare services and assessing the feasibility of immunity passports, mass vaccinations, and scaling up of contact tracing. Moving forward, healthcare IT companies such as Microsoft, Optum, Intel, and AWS are betting big on enterprise-grade AI platforms that predict pandemics, forecast patient volume across providers, authenticate reimbursement, and drive general well-being of the insured population through medication management and self-care enablement.
In light of the lessons learned from the pandemic and the changing economic and business scenario, Frost & Sullivan has re-visited predictions, identified top growth opportunities, and analyzed risk-mitigation measures adopted by companies to survive the remainder of 2020, including:
- The KSA, UAE and Indian telehealth markets have reached a tipping point with growth of more than 200% during the pandemic. Virtual consultations by healthcare professionals will become the mainstream care delivery model post-pandemic. However, reimbursement, training physicians, and platform scalability will be the key to recalibrating telehealth.
- Informatics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions addressing workflow automation and operational analytics will witness 100% growth in 2020. For instance, GE Healthcare's industry-first, FDA-cleared Critical Care Suite AI tool will help radiologists prioritize critical cases. The resumption in imaging for the backlog of elective procedures in Q3 and Q4 will result in tele-radiology and AI-based solutions gaining from new investments. Scale-up in capacity, flexible payment options, and redistribution of the workload will accelerate partnerships.
