Moving towards personalised and digital health

New technologies are revolutionising the current healthcare system, and pharmaceutical companies are facing many new challenges.

These technologies have already accelerated the miniaturisation of medical devices, but also significantly improved their performance.

The focus should now be on the democratisation and accessibility of healthcare services:

- reduce medical costs
- shorten the patient journey
- ease hospital congestion
- improve city-hospital relationships
- tackle medical desertification.

The Covid-19 crisis exposed the limits of current healthcare systems. For their part, startups managed to adjust their targeting and solutions to better respond to the situation.

From a curative healthcare model to a preventive and predictive model

Startups are taking action to improve various stages of the patient journey. The recent pandemic has accelerated the development of digital health solutions but also their adoption on both ends (by patients and healthcare professionals).

More specifically, four healthtech categories have known rapid growth in 2020:

- Telemedicine and digital therapy enabling remote patient monitoring and digital treatment. This is particularly relevant as we are facing a growing prevalence of chronic diseases.
- Biotech accelerating drug development and treatment personalisation.
- AI and machine learning that can automate and speed up diagnosis.
- Robotics to disinfect hospitals and improve the quality of medical acts.

Diversify your portfolio thanks to partnerships with digital health startups

Startups struggle to structure clear and effective regulatory roadmaps. They often look to partner up with industry leaders who can help them in their roadmaps as well as finance clinical trials and facilitate market access.

Still, the main challenge for startups is gaining access to data and ensuring its security and interoperability. Thus, partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and research institutes are key to accelerate these innovative projects.

On the other hand, pharmaceutical players collaborate with startups to enrich their offerings and propose digital health services to complement their existing products. Early Metrics supports corporates in the identification of relevant startups in specific therapeutic fields, throughout the patient journey.