Even as we are moving into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare professionals across the globe continue to face unrelenting workloads and acute staff shortages. Over time, the continued rise of chronic infections, increasing healthcare costs, broadening inequalities, and climate change have only added to the strain. Meanwhile, patient and consumer expectations of healthcare are altering. Health systems now need to provide care that is more accessible, scalable, affordable, and equitable, while preserving the health of the planet.
Key features:
- The pandemic increased the demand for home healthcare equipment. Digitally enabled care can be considered as the core basis in healthcare transformation.
- Healthcare continues to experience the momentum of driving innovation.
- Owing to the changing landscape, healthcare industry leaders need to reflect on the upcoming trends and recognize the shifts that can be implemented in healthcare in 2022.
The healthcare industry has undergone significant growth and changes over a few years. The industry is encountering a massive wave of investment, innovation, and new entrants from varied industries. Here are the top trends in healthcare that will continue to advance through 2022.
Top Healthcare Trends to Look Out for in 2022:
1) ESG Strategies Focused on Innovation
The life science industry is moving towards employing a model of social impact focusing on ESG (environment, sustainability, governance) and customizing treatments for specific patients. As healthcare sectors continue to grow and expand, companies are turning to strategic initiatives to bring innovations.
Big pharma and biotech companies are facing difficulties managing the execution of these in-house programs and supporting their intentions of staying relevant. To overcome these hurdles, they must scrutinize and streamline processes that are socially responsible and support environmental goals. This may help to not only meet their financial benchmarks but also enable them to set patient-centric standards that will likely take hold in the future.
2) Data Analytics to Accelerate Innovation
With our growing awareness of genetics and disease, the life sciences industry is relying on data analytics more than ever. It can be utilized to enhance drug development & manufacturing processes, identify the patterns in clinical trial study results, predict patients’ responses to medications, and analyze diagnostic results.
a) Data: The Key Factor in Optimizing Operations
Even with the advancements including artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, 5G connectivity, and the Internet of things (IoT), data remains the very central core of healthcare. The industry is finally understanding how data can benefit in delivering financial and clinical success.
With the pandemic, the world witnessed how global healthcare systems managed personal protection equipment (PPE), payers addressed social determinants of health (SDOH), and how providers leveraged remote vitals to deliver treatments with real-world insights. Through effective optimization, healthcare professionals can leverage predictive analytics to allow leaders to make more precise and valuable data-driven decisions.
Healthcare Data Analytics will play a major role in developing an ecosystem of shared knowledge and communications. Employing a 360° approach to Healthcare Analytics will present new opportunities and advancements essential for tomorrow’s medicine.
Read more: “$1.72 Billion”: How Alternative Data Is Transforming Investment Research
b) Employing data analytics and visualization to address patient’s health:
The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the spotlight on data analytics, bringing to light the immense decision-making challenge faced by the healthcare sector in real-time. Medical professionals are leveraging machine learning algorithms to examine effective outcomes, driving future development efforts. Data analytics with AI promises to track the effects of different therapies on groups of patients over time. Utilizing the advantage of both technology and partnerships, providers and researchers are working to improve patient care, under rapidly changing conditions.
Enforcing the right tools can help streamline the innovation of actionable, data-informed decisions, but accomplishing these fast-changing circumstances is a bigger challenge.
Read more: Healthcare Analytics Consulting: Are You AI-Ready?
3) Telemedicine and Digital Care Solutions
With the healthcare landscape changing, providers are embracing technology to improve and support patient outcomes. This is specifically applicable when it comes to acute and chronic disease management. Telemedicine and virtual care programs are enabling doctors to monitor patients remotely by employing sensors to track vital signs, health records, and patient data.
Telemedicine has the potential to enhance access to healthcare in a world where half of its population does not have access to fundamental services. Situations may arise where many people still consider an in-person interaction with healthcare professionals, so healthcare providers will need to regard this when implementing the services.
Employing more consumer-facing solutions with hybrid models, including both face-to-face and telemedicine, could be the future of healthcare, making telemedicine more mainstream and improving consumer access. While the challenges continue to arise, irrespective of employing the best way to use telemedicine effectively, the shift is likely to undergo enhancements.
4) Influence of AI
AI is redefining the healthcare industry by enhancing the quality of patient care, outcomes, and reducing the costs of hospitals, for insurance and payers alike. Artificial intelligence is swiftly extending its reach across several sectors in healthcare. Technology has the potential to accelerate multiple operations and reduce costs. AI is also being employed to analyze large quantities of patient data, thereby increasing the accuracy of disease detection.
Read more: Top AI Trends to Watch Out for in 2022
These 2022 healthcare trends demonstrate how analytical and sustainable innovation can help us reach that goal.
A Year of Recovery and Expansion
Healthcare, in the last two years, suffered an enormous disruption and has undergone comprehensive innovation. COVID-19 has exposed the challenges and deep-seated cracks across the healthcare sector.
With the entire world standing still, healthcare was propelled to reevaluate its operationalities across the continuum of care. The pressing reality brought to light that the need for innovation in healthcare is far more extensive and rapid. It magnified the necessity to fast-track a slow pace of innovation.
Technology is a great equalizer. While the pandemic intensified disparities, it also ushered in an age of digital transformation. Developing technologies are enabling healthcare to reach more patients in new ways and empowering community healthcare workers by expanding their access to expertise.
The healthcare industry is gradually but certainly embracing the new healthcare trends, which highlights that the sector that fails to incorporate modern technology will be, surely, left behind. With clinical, operational, and financial seismic changes occurring over the past few months, the momentum to truly transform healthcare has finally taken root.
Read more: Wearable Tech: A Promise to Revolutionize Healthcare
Foreseeing more Accessible and Responsive Healthcare
The pandemic has disrupted the healthcare sector, exposing underlying weaknesses and initiating long-standing changes. With its cracks exposed, the healthcare industry must now look inward and implement deep-seated reforms to address the challenges and enhance efficiency.
With the focus shifting from innovation to digital transformation, there is a crucial need to eliminate what has held us back. While coping with the new normal, healthcare providers need to leverage technology to facilitate greater access across dispersed teams, timely healthcare delivery, improved productivity, and faster R&D cycles. Healthcare needs to continue on this path of recovery while simultaneously seeking modes to enhance efficiency, intelligence, and connectivity.
While 2021 was focused on learning and implementing new strategies into the long-standing and outdated healthcare system, 2022 will require us to continue to innovate and adapt to the ever-changing ecosystem. We can only advance if we commit to scaling this digital transformation to enhance continuity, quality, and access to care.
With the paradigm shifting towards a new era of digital care, everyone is now looking forward to experiencing what’s on the horizon for healthcare in 2022.
To develop an equitable health technology culture, adopting future-focused solutions can help to support the capabilities and flexibility healthcare enterprises require for delivering the right care at the right place and time.
In 2022 and years ahead, the medical research and healthcare sector is likely to become more agile to deliver new treatments. Organizations are envisioning increasing their investments in technologies, workflows, and management capabilities to shorten development cycles. The emerging trends are pointing to a future distinguished by more profound employment of smart data, adaptable workflows, and advanced technologies.
With offices in New York, Austin, Seattle, London, Zurich, Pune, and Hyderabad, SG Analytics, a pioneer in Research and Analytics, offer tailor-made services to enterprises worldwide. Driven by our ‘patient first’ ideology, our healthcare analytics solutions facilitate a better understanding of your patients so that you can personalize patient supervision and engagement. If you are looking to make critical data-driven decisions that stimulate accelerated growth and breakthrough performance, contact us today.
