Ozva Admin
Funding for digital health startups and initiatives has skyrocketed during the pandemic as entrepreneurs and consumers increasingly embrace telehealth, remote monitoring and a host of devices from sleep trackers to exercise bands.
Total VC investment in digital health hit an all-time high of $29.2 billion in 2021, according to Rock Health. Funding has cooled in 2022, to $12.6 billion by the end of the third quarter, but advances in technology like artificial intelligence and growing interest from big tech companies are sure to drive innovation going forward.
Seattle-area startups such as CalmWave, undulation Careful, outgoing AI Y birch AI It emerged in 2022 to help solve medical problems ranging from excessive noise in hospitals to mental health care for the elderly. The biggest companies also signaled big ambitions; Amazon earlier this year announced its offer to acquire primary care company One Medical for $3.9 billion and launched a new online health service, Amazon Clinic.
What trends do experts see for digital health nationally and in the Seattle area by 2023? We asked five to weigh in on their predictions.
Taha Kass-HoutVice President of Health and Technology AI and Chief Medical Officer of Amazon Web Services
Unprecedented innovation and collaboration in the healthcare and life sciences industries are driving the industry to move from patient care to prevention through a precise, personalized and humane patient experience. The industry has been experimenting with the cloud for a decade and understands how the technology and machine learning can enable more targeted diagnosis and treatment, known as precision medicine; personalize patient journeys; and improve health outcomes.
In 2023 and beyond, we expect healthcare and life sciences organizations to continue to invest in modernizing their infrastructure, gain actionable insights from data, and internalize what it means to personalize healthcare. This will involve integrating genomics and other omics data into therapeutic development, leveraging machine learning and analytics to improve clinician workflows, incorporating social determinants data into disease management at the patient or population level, and using structured and unstructured data to predict diseases with much more accuracy. — help move the industry from reactive care to preventive patient care.
kingsley ndohfounder and chief strategist, AI ferret
We should expect to see more people-centric digital health innovations to support clinical decision-making, such as predictive diagnostic technologies or tools to predict the clinical outcomes of certain cancer drugs. These tools will increasingly incorporate diversity into training data sets for machine learning models and will put the specific needs of the target user at the center of the development process, including consideration of cultural perspectives.
There will also be better integration of data generated from wearable devices, smartphone apps, and electronic medical records to support clinical decisions, behavior change, and personalization at scale through the power of artificial intelligence.
little lorettamanaging director of WRF Capital
Funding for most early-stage digital startups will remain limited in 2023, but I see growth opportunities in several areas. We will continue to see more companies offering access to mental health services through innovative products and approaches, such as Joon Y Ripple Careand companies focused on improving connectivity and tools for better remote care such as valuing health Y wavy diagnosis.
Remote care is especially important for underserved rural communities that have limited or no access to nearby health resources. This need is only increasing, driven in part by demographic changes in the patient population. The proportion of seniors in Washington state and across the country is projected to grow, particularly in rural areas. This rural population of older adults represents a large percentage of people who suffer from chronic diseases and should be linked to the services.
Shyam Gollakotaco-founder of wavy diagnosis and Sound Life Sciences (acquired by Google), a professor at the Allen School of the University of Washington
The adoption of telehealth that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic is likely here to stay. We may also see a greater number of remote home tests like COVID-19 or blood tests that will bring telehealth closer to an in-person visit. While much attention has been paid to the use of smartphones and smartwatches for mobile health, headphones will be the next exciting platform for monitoring health and wellness, as well as potentially, in the coming years, electroencephalography (EEG) signals. ) that may open up new opportunities for brain interfaces.
Hopefully, we’ll also see a number of startups apply long language models to address various pain points in the healthcare system with the goal of improving efficiencies and reducing costs. Deep learning techniques will continue to improve and we will start to see more promising results in addressing important problems such as the use of AI to discover drugs and vaccines.
Su In LeeUW professor of computer science and engineering
Next year we will see AI devices with explainable AI (XAI) functionality, which will allow humans to understand the reasoning process of complex black-box machine learning models. I also see FDA approval processes incorporating XAI analytics to build trust, transparency, fairness, and actionability of machine learning models.
Increased reimbursement by insurance providers and the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will fuel an increase in the number of FDA-approved AI devices. In the long term, the success and equity of AI medical devices will depend on the extent to which FDA approval processes are updated to reflect the specific issues of machine learning. For example, if there are no requirements to test an AI dermatology device on a wide range of skin tones, it seems likely that AI devices that perform poorly on darker skin tones will be publicly available and disproportionately misdiagnose people with darker skin. dark.
Ozva Admin
