The new decade may witness a more advanced stage of digitisation of health sector infrastructure and services
The year 2020 was an extremely eventful one for the healthcare and pharma industry, and for humanity as well. The world faced the deadliest pandemic in recent history which killed 18,00,114 people worldwide and, it seems, will continue to wreak havoc in 2021, too. As we enter the new year, it is time to look at some of the trends that could dominate in terms of health technologies, organisations, businesses, regulatory authorities, products and services. One overarching theme that flows right through this whole transformative process is technology in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data, robotics and cloud computing, among others.
The new decade may be witness to a more advanced stage of digitisation of healthcare infrastructure and services. With the Government and private players, both ploughing in a substantial amount of money with the intention of wholesale overhauling of legacy Information Technology (IT) systems, hitherto chiefly used for recording payment of bills, the next decade will be marked by a greater number of services related to healthcare being delivered through advanced IT-based systems. While digital therapeutics could increasingly underpin remote diagnosis and treatment, digital solutions such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) would become more routine. Purely in terms of infrastructure, a combination of traditional brick-and-mortar hospitals and a modular and scalable network of healthcare givers and community healthcare hubs will come into being. Traditional hospital buildings would more likely be fronted by unmanned reception facilities, face recognition systems and automated disease screening kiosks. There could even be robotic and autonomous healthcare assistants in hospitals, a phenomenon highly likely in developing countries which typically face a shortage of healthcare professionals. At the same time, remotely guided tele-ICUs and Smart ICUs would become more common. Although foldable and portable hospital units have already been developed in our country, they would become more sophisticated and advanced in the coming decade. Rising on the back of connected devices — remote monitoring devices and wearables, combined with applications and software — the resultant Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) would increasingly become the change agent in the coming decade. With wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth establishing a 24X7 connection between patients (using stationary medical devices, implanted and wearable external ones) and practitioners and caregivers, virtual/remote care would visibly become more commonplace. Some of these devices such as blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters and blood glucose monitors would also give a fillip to self-monitoring of health. Significantly, AI-based mental wellness medical-grade chatbots are already being used to help people with psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and stress. They would become more commonplace in the coming decade.
Also, with increasing digitisation and application of advanced analytics across the value chain including research and development (R&D), manufacturing, quality, supply chain and sales, the pharma industry is set to wear a new look. With the need for instant delivery of pharma products regardless of the location and time, companies would need to strengthen their supply chains and align with hospitals and care centres evolving a new integrated model for ePharma. The coming decade would see a large-scale shift to digital marketing tools such as videos, mobile marketing, digital content, social media, high impact visuals and live sessions on social media for pharma products and services. The new decade would also witness a greater collaboration and partnership between drug companies and health technology firms. This would be a natural development. Technologies such as AI, big data and ML would not only compress the time required between drug research and product development, including clinical trials, testing and so on, these would also be able to churn a staggering amount of data previously unheard of for R&D while also streamlining processes and reducing wastage. In the coming decade, drug R&D would also entail more of gene-based experimenting which would map how the genetic makeup of a person responds to a medicine. Related to the above, genomics in combination with AI and big data would be increasingly deployed for treatment of a patient accounting for the individual characteristics of a person in terms of variability in genes, environment and lifestyle. By the next decade, these technologies would have to a great extent found answers to several forms of cancer, neuro-degenerative diseases and so on. At the same time, as R&D in biotechnology and biopharma including vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics get spurred by the unprecedented pandemics, AI and big data would also be used in epidemiological research and forecasting on a larger scale.
The coming decade will see the legalisation of medical marijuana by more countries in addition to the existing ones. Finally, taking lessons from the outbreak of Covid-19, given the commonality of the challenge posed to humanity, the pharma regulatory authorities across the world would increasingly evolve a more cooperative framework to deal with any future pandemic.
(The writer is president, Council for Healthcare and Pharma. The views expressed are personal.)
