Health: Heartcore Consumer Technology Trends 2021

Healthcare investments set new records in 2020.

We can anticipate exponential growth in investments in the future.

Consumers are increasingly embracing telemedicine.

What a difference a year makes. We expect a large portion of those interested in telehealth to convert to paying users.

Share of people considering using telemedicine (US, %)

2019: 11%

2020: 76%

Co-existence of horizontal and vertical telemedicine models.

Primary care providers must decide which verticals they want to defend.

Telemedicine providers are shifting to omnichannel.

Online primary care providers are vertically integrating into physical spaces, partly by regulatory request and partly for cashflow. Kry acquired Helsa, one of Sweden's largest healthcare centers in 2020. The primary care provider opened its first physical health clinic in 2018 to provide patients with fully integrated digital and physical primary healthcare. Building trust offline yields long term customer loyalty.

Offline doctors' visits will become more sporadic.

Telemedecine coupled with innovative hardware makes for accurate home diagnosis. Integrating at-home diagnostic kits into the virtual health journey reduces friction and lets doctors remotely monitor patients from afar.

Membership based primary care platforms are rising.

Primary care will be transformed to become increasingly digitized and integrated. In addition to 24/7 access to virtual care, members get seamless access to offices in major cities. One Medical is leading the way with European player, Avi Medical, following suit.

Wearables are well placed to interface with other products and services.

Hardware is advanced. Startups recognize the opportunity in working with fitness trackers for valuable data capture. Yet there is still a lack of logic and actionability on data outputs. We are expecting improvements in implementation and sophistication of feedback loops

The digital therapeutics documentation gap.

A plethora of research on digital therapeutics is published yet little is peer reviewed.

Total articles published: 21,725

Scientific publications: 5,332

Peer-reviewed scientific publications: 384

Peer-reviewed scientific publications with data: 153

The path to reimbursement is still very long and painful.

This will impede health startups to use insurances as distribution models.