Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Post-Pandemic Global Healthcare Market Outlook, 2020 has been launched as part of its global Transformational Health Growth Partnership Service program.

The analysis forecasts that 2020 will be an ‘unforgiving but transformational year,’ and shows that post COVID-19, the healthcare industry is expected to witness a drop in growth from 5.3% to 0.6% in 2020, with revenues remaining below the $2 trillion mark.

WHY IT MATTERS

In light of the lessons learned from the pandemic and the changing economic scenario, Frost & Sullivan has re-visited predictions, identified top growth opportunities, and analysed risk-mitigation measures adopted by companies to survive the remainder of 2020, including:

• Reimbursement, training physicians, and platform scalability will be the key to recalibrating telehealth.
• Scale-up in capacity, flexible payment options, and redistribution of the workload will accelerate partnerships.
• To assist with the uneven distribution of ventilators across regions, Resmed has launched a remote monitoring solution for ventilators in the US and Europe through its cloud-based AirView platform for homecare.
• With alternate testing sites like pharmacies becoming permanent ecosystem participants, CVS and Walgreens have begun building the infrastructure to offer IVD testing at their locations.

THE LARGER TREND

Unmesh Lal, transformational health program manager, explains: "While the short-term demand for testing and the race to find a vaccine intensifies,  governments are reallocating budgets to finance healthcare services and assessing the feasibility of immunity passports, mass vaccinations, and scaling up of contact tracing.”

Healthcare IT companies such as Microsoft, Optum, Intel, and AWS are currently working on AI platforms that predict pandemics, forecast patient volume across providers, authenticate reimbursement, and provide medication management and self-care enablement.

ON THE RECORD

Lal adds: "While the life sciences segment seems to be surviving and thriving, in certain scenarios, medical technologies and imaging are expected to be hit the hardest. Elective procedures being on hold and delayed or prolonged procurement of capital equipment will have a negative impact on revenue, from $413.9 billion to $377.1 billion for medical devices and from $31.5 billion to $18.1 billion for imaging equipment.”

“Additionally, with telehealth transforming care delivery and health IT enhancements in analytics and interoperability, digital health will continue to thrive at a growth rate of 7.9% in 2020."