The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health tech sector
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented shift to digital services across several sectors and tech enabled businesses are not just surviving, but emerging even stronger.
According to the LOREAL CEO, in e-commerce, what they achieved in 3 weeks would have otherwise taken them three years to do. Microsoft CEO also reports that the company has seen two years of digital transformation in two months. This, complimented with NASDAQ being at an all time high suggests that the future of businesses may be defined by their technology. Overall there is huge disparity in valuations, particularly in public markets between the winners i.e. those that have a digital strategy to traditional brick and motor businesses like malls, retail shops, restaurants and so on.
Amidst the numerous sectors adopting technology to mitigate the circumstances of a global pandemic, there is one that has been at the forefront of the UK’s fight against COVID-19, health-tech. The COVID-19 crisis has turned the spotlight on the UK health-tech sector at a time when investment has been consistently strong, attracting $7.7 billion from global venture capital investors in the last five years, according to data from Tech Nation’s Data Commons.
“We are seeing scale-ups making huge leaps that would normally take months or years, in just a few weeks,” said Gerard Grech, chief executive of Tech Nation. “The UK’s health tech sector has grown in size and value in recent years. That puts it in a strong position right now and it is brilliant to see the sector using its resources to step up to the challenge.”
UNICORNS IN THE HEALTH-TECH SPACE
Tech Nation’s Data Commons goes on report that the UK has more than 100 health-tech start-ups with the potential to become $1bn businesses, making it the second biggest sub-set of the national tech sector after fin-tech and that the sector employs more than 127,400 people across 3,860 companies in a market worth £36.41bn. The UK health-tech sector has been able to step up because it is one of the strongest in the world, having attracted $7.7bn from investors across the last five years. For contextual size the NHS is the fifth largest employer in the world.
Health-tech sector responses to coronavirus have included free access to platforms, new digital assistant technologies, the distribution and sharing of vital resource and patients and doctors rapidly adopted telemedicine and other digital tools to deliver care.
IS THE NEW DIGITAL WORLD OF HEALTH-TECH HERE TO STAY?
“Investment in telehealth has exploded since the outbreak,” Jason Bellett, co-founder and COO of Eko Health, told me over the phone. “We’ve had more than three-times the in-bound requests already,” he added. Eko is a Berkeley, California-based health-tech company that created an FDA approved next-gen digital stethoscope with an AI-powered cardiac screening platform – similar to Shazam for heartbeats. The devices range in price from $200 to $350 and if prescribed by a physician, are often covered by insurance.
“We’ve had a 210% increase in calls this past week,” said Nick Desai, CEO of Heal, a company that offers video calls with a physician and in-person doctor visits to your home. Heal operates in some of the regions hardest hit by COVID-19 cases including the Silicon Valley in Northern California, New York City, and Seattle, Washington. But he says that the recent surge in house calls goes far beyond coronavirus concerns.
(Source March 18, 2020: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2020/03/18/coronavirus-tech-telemedicine-and-gadgets-war-against-covid-19/5058150002/)
Adding to that, an Ipsos MORI survey revealed that there had been an 80% increase in the number of people that had used an online GP in the third week of March compared to in the second week, demonstrating that the general public is willing to adopt these technologies should they be made available, which longer-term could result in significant improvements to the speed in which a patient can be reviewed and appropriate care delivered.
A survey of patient contact preferences for a GP consultation agency found that 47% of respondents preferred a phone consultation, compared to just a quarter (25%) who requested a face-to-face consultation.
Professor Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of GPs stated on the 11th of April that the in-person GP appointments had drastically reduced from 80% in the last year to 7-8% over the last three weeks. He also pointed out that the majority of the virtual consultations were being done over the phone rather than via video call. The preference for more simple technology, like phone call consultations, means that the barrier of entry is a lot simpler and is able to be rolled out nationally more efficiently than implementing more complex technology systems.
The demographics of digital health adoption also appears to be changing. Analysis from online pharmacy service Echo shows a dramatic increase in over 65s using their service over the course of March. This is a significant shift and we’re seeing this across sectors. The numbers also provide positive indication this is a permanent rather than temporary shift with the appreciation of the efficiency that can be achieved.
Privacy and Data intrusion
A real concern for all health-tech companies is to ensure that they balance potential public-health benefits with intrusions on privacy by emerging surveillance-data collection technologies associated with digital transformation. Some digital-health leaders emphasise that health vs. privacy is a false choice and that we must ensure that the digital tools we use have robust data-governance provisions from the beginning. If not, the rights we surrender during this crisis might prove impossible to regain after it’s over. (Source, April 1, 2020: https://www.aei.org/articles/how-will-coronavirus-change-the-health-care-industry/)
COLLABORATION AND NEW MARKET ENTRANTS, CORPORATES AND PURE PLAY TECH COMPANIES
The pandemic has also seen rival companies work together in an interoperable fashion, with Apple and Google recently announcing they are working together to create a COVID-19 symptoms tracker to work across both iOS and Android devices. This has revealed a collaborative approach to the use of technology to combat the pandemic sweeping the nation and may promote innovative technology-enabled approaches to future crises. The ways that technology and health companies have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic include:
Microsoft has given all users of NHSmail in England and Scotland access to Teams, its workplace collaboration platform, for three months
Microsoft, Google, Palantir, AWS and Faculty are supporting NHSX and NHS England’s technical teams to develop a data platform that provides safe, secure, reliable and timely data
Siemens Healthineers – working with the WHO to develop a fast-acting test to identify patients with coronavirus.
Facebook – producing heat maps of coronavirus spread in real time, helping promote high quality information.
Doctor Care Anywhere – free training for GPs in the UK to help them manage and conduct video consultations.
Temporary staffing platforms Patchwork and OnCare make their systems free for NHS Trusts, and care workers.
Unmind, the British workplace mental-health platform, and meditation app Headspace offer NHS staff free access.
Big Health is offering over 1 million NHS staff the Sleepio and Daylight apps free.
Healthtech unicorn Babylon’s 24/7 GP at Hand app and coronavirus Care Assistant app, a symptom tracker, are relieving pressure on 111 services.
AccuRx, a trusted tool for UK GPs to send text messages to patients, built a video consultation product over a weekend and is now used by over 90% of GP practices and for online appointments.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies has provided its suite of sequencing products to countries worldwide, to help with the research and genetic epidemiology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Blue Prism has donated ‘robot workers’ to the NHS to help Trusts automate manual processes from hiring staff to increasing video patient consultations.
Intelligent Ultrasound, a simulation tool to teach healthcare workers to look for signs of respiratory disease, was released to customers for free and is being used to teach staff how to use it at the temporary 4,000-bed NHS Nightingale Hospital at London’s Excel.
Faculty is working with the NHS creating a new NHS AI lab that will set standards for the safe and effective use of AI across the health service.
Triscribe’s hospital analytics team has shifted its focus to gathering and tracking data related to coronavirus, including the track of drug use and medicine stocks.
Medopad, for example, is working with clinicians from Imperial College London and John Hopkins University, to develop a remote patient monitoring platform for chronically ill patients and the vulnerable.
This global crisis has revealed how acute the need for innovative, technology-enabled solutions is for our society and Jacob Haddad, CEO & Co-Founder of accuRx, a video consultation product that allows for a safe and reliable method of communication for NHS staff with patients and colleagues, remarks “When the pandemic is over, we will have seen a decade of digital transformation take place.”