Global trends in the digital transformation of the healthcare industry

Abstract

National health systems are experiencing a number of common global challenges: population growth, demographic ageing, the prevalence of chronic noncommunicable diseases, the constant growth of health-care costs, while increasing resource scarcity, including staffing. At the same time, the rapid development of information technologies, including the accumulation of big data, artificial intelligence, telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and the increasing availability of high-performance mobile devices and a high-speed Internet connection create truly unique prospects for the development of digital healthcare products and services. Growth of investment from tech giants and venture capital funds is one of the main drivers of digital healthcare transformation. More and more innovative products are being offered not to enhance the effectiveness of existing processes within health systems, but to create new alternative ways to receive medical care or reduce problems in its delivery. Thus, a key customer and a user of digital healthcare products is gradually becoming not the heads of medical organizations, public health authorities or doctors, but patients themselves. In this article, we present an analysis of the existing global trends and directions of development of the digital healthcare market, form our image of the future and the most prospective scenarios and technologies for products and services in this area.