Digital health (2021)

1. 1. Collaboration, not competition

   → Realistically, it will be difficult for any one company to own the entire healthtech value chain, from prevention to diagnosis to treatment.

   → As leaders in the field have begun snapping up smaller companies to integrate their services, the future of digital health may lie in companies building up the ecosystem together to offer different entry points depending on patient need.

2. 2. Winning online and offline

   → Patients may complete consultations and monitor their conditions digitally, but still require in-person examinations or assistance.

   → Nailing the customer experience will become a matter of smoothing the transition between online and offline as much as possible. At the same time, adding a physical footprint to digital services may slow down expansion efforts.

3. 3. Towards wellbeing and prevention

   → While our current health system is primarily focused on providing care and treatment, a greater shift towards wellbeing and prevention is under way.

   → Underpinning this trend is the possibility of providing increasingly personalised insights based on a wealth of new data — for example from wearables — and advances in analytics and AI.

4. 4. The problem with scaling

   → To scale across borders, consumer-facing healthtechs need to adhere to regulations that may differ not only from country to country, but region to region in Europe.

   → Startups focusing on SaaS may have an easier time scaling internationally, as rules for plugging into healthtechs, rather than operating them, tend to be more lax.

Who early stage startups are up against