Digital Health Trends for 2022

We at BeKey came up with our own list of trends in digital health in 2022. 

There are already so many solutions in digital health solving specific problems. For hospitals, doctors, clinicians it’s becoming a challenge to use them all at the same time and synchronize the data between them so considering this problem we can define our first two major trends for the upcoming years and 2022 specifically:

1. Mergers and acquisitions - For the first three quarters of 2021, Rock Health tracked 216 digital health mergers and acquisitions, outpacing the entirety of last year’s deal count of 146.

Instead of developing new features, spending extra effort on user acquisition and expansion, startups would consider M&A as a great option. Especially when there are so many investors ready to pour big money into the industry.

2. Aggregation and integration

Startups and tech companies which choose not to merge with others (or don’t have enough resources) will try to add as many features as possible in order to cover all the needs of their target audience. So for instance, if your startup tracks users’ biomarkers, you might want to add some wellness features like tracking your diet and sports activities, so the user doesn’t need to use 2 apps but can do it all in one.

Another way to increase the number of features you have is integration. Integration with multiple devices, platforms, and EHR systems. That means that companies should dedicate extra effort to creating an open API for others to integrate with their products.

3. Telehealth —> should be more looking into - remote patient monitoring ( RPM)

Although in-person visits have returned, many patients have gotten used to the convenience of virtual care and expect to have it as an option, but worries about the quality of care and limitations on what kind of care can be delivered through video (hint: it’s not much) have driven the use of remote patient monitoring (or RPM) as a supplementary tool. With RPM, patients can track some vitals from home through a connected or manual device, and add their data into a central database (ie, the EMR).

Remote patient monitoring helps to both track important data and get a professional consultation while staying at home.

4. Decentralized clinical trials

Cutting huge costs for patient onboarding and the effectiveness of the trials is the top priority for tech companies and pharma. We already see a huge boost in raising funds for startups working in this area and this trend will definitely continue.

5. Digital Prescriptions & Digital Health records

Digital Prescription is one innovation that is transforming the healthcare landscape. An electronic prescription is a digital version of a paper prescription created by healthcare practitioners using software. Also, digital Prescriptions help in creating digital health records of patients which in turn improves patient outcomes as this reduces the chances of human error to interpreting wrong medicines, e-Rx proves to be beneficial for patients as well as doctors. 2022 is expected to have a great boost in the use of electronic prescriptions.

6. Endpoint security

Endpoint security is the practice of securing endpoints or entry points of end-user devices such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.

The number of endpoints is only increasing with the rapid pandemic-related shift to remote work and this relates to healthcare as well. More and more doctors and therapists provide online consultations to their patients and in such cases, the doctor’s personal laptop becomes one of the biggest vulnerabilities for potential cyber-attacks and data breaches.

Tech companies and hospitals need to pay extra attention to developing protection solutions and educating the staff on how to protect all the endpoints.

These are the trends we think should prevail in 2022. If you think we missed any of the important trends, please leave a comment under the video and of course, subscribe to our channel for more digital health content.