The ‘Patient of the Future’ is Driving Radical Innovation in Healthcare

Digital data collection, utilisation of real-word data and patient-centric thinking will all contribute to the rapid development of a new healthcare landscape, says Debiopharm Innovation Fund’s Tanja Dowe.

In recent years, we have seen thinking shift from focusing on a disease’s treatment to seriously considering the wider potential for its prevention, enabled by dramatic advances in data science and supported by a pressing need to reduce healthcare costs.

Leaps forward in both digital tools and widespread collection of medical and health data have provided many opportunities for the healthcare industry to adapt and change. The advent of COVID-19 has been a great testing environment for these technologies where, for example, the adoption of telemedicine was no longer an option but an urgent need to plug the gap in face-to-face medical care.

The healthcare industry is also changing as its ‘customers’ move from ‘boomer’ patients to digital natives. These individuals no longer accept the patient role of past generations. They want to be involved, proactive contributors to their own health, with access to their own health information.

This was also one of the key messages from the recent Healthcare Automation and Digitalization Congress (AUTOMA+) 2021, at which I led a round-table discussion on the ‘prevention versus treatment’.