Aging and growing population, increase in chronic diseases, better health awareness and improved digital transformation service that is needful but costly has increased the healthcare demand and expenditure to a large scale.

According to an analysis, healthcare spending will reach $10.059 trillion by 2022, giving a lot of scopes for the healthcare organization to improve its services and get as per the expectation of the people. Although the per capita healthcare spending per person varies from person to person, still it has drastically improved in the last decade.

The biggest gap lies in the lack of proper infrastructure, trained physicians and existing delivery model. Thus there comes a need for smart health community.

-Appropriate treatment at an appropriate time, inappropriate place, for an appropriate person

-Clinicians to use technology for more accurate diagnosis and treatment

-Patients to be more informed and actively involved in their treatment plan

-New, cost-effective delivery model bring healthcare to places and people that don’t have it

-Efficiency improves; waste declines

Some of the latest entrant in the healthcare segment comprises:

– Apple’s work to give iPhone users the tool to review, store, and share their medical information, including lab results, allergy list, and others.

– Alphabet’s Google unit is working on AI to tackle the disease, from monitoring to detection, to lifestyle management.

-Alphabet’s healthcare unit Verily is working on detecting retinopathy, that makes the machines for retinal imaging tests and eye disease detection.

-Philip’s “Connected Care Solution” is an intelligent health care solution that allows providers to monitor and deliver round the clock solution by linking patient data with hospitals.

Shifting Health focus

Aging population and rise in communicable diseases have shifted from curing disease to preventing them for a longer time frame. Emphasizing these proactive measure result in promoting overall population healthcare which needs the government, providers and community partners interact correspondingly instead of acting in silos.

Virtual Health/Telehealth

The overall goal of virtual care is to improve access to critical service and reduce cost constraint. It is not just video visits it goes beyond that base on the need of patient population, capabilities of the organization and availability of resources. The virtual health is beat gained by the spotlight on digital health innovations.

There is a various initiative for virtual healthcare that includes physician-to-physician communication to improve patient care, telehealth care, remote patient monitoring, chronic disease management, health-tracking, patient accountability, care-coordination, video-telematic and other.

Conclusion: The healthcare sector has seen a massive improvement in the last decade. Owing to people inclination to better and connected healthcare there needs to be an improvement from the healthcare provider segment that calls for virtual healthcare by various digital initiatives.