To Win in Healthcare IT, Stop Talking About Technology

The global healthcare IT market totaled more than $74 billion last year and is growing at a healthy 10% annually, but businesses that are looking to muscle into the market for electronic health records or clinical information systems will face an uphill climb and a high risk of failure.

The bigger opportunity is to apply technology to areas that don’t lend themselves easily to automation, such as genomic analytics and better understanding adverse drug interactions.

This emerging category of “bio IT” is one where big tech firms haven’t established beachheads and may never even try to do so, according to Shahid Shah, a veteran healthcare technology serial entrepreneur who co-founded Citus Health, a company that is bringing breakthrough technology to home healthcare, and recently launched Medigy, a health sciences innovation marketplace.

“There are a lot of opportunities in cohort-specific and personalized public health education, sharing risk data across patients and populations,” Shah told an Iron Mountain working group on innovation. And in a post-COVID-19 world that will be transformed by telemedicine. Services such as remote and self-diagnostics are still an open field.

A new class of healthcare practitioners is emerging who don’t have professional credentials, ranging from ambulance drivers who may be called upon to administer vaccines to users of smartphone apps that can diagnose jaundice by analyzing a selfie.