In this segment from Motley Fool Live, recorded on Feb. 17, Fool.com contributor Rachel Warren is joined by Heather Gates, Managing Director at Deloitte, to talk about new trends in healthcare technology and how they're transforming the industry.
More insights regarding health-tech trends can be found in the health-tech spotlight of Deloitte Road to Next, a quarterly report that provides data and insights regarding venture capital investment trends in key expansion stage sectors.
Heather Gates: Consumers are more and more taking ownership of their healthcare. You've also seen this great emergence in wellness. There are whole new categories of healthcare health and wellness that are emerging, creating bigger markets and really putting consumers in the driver's seat of what they want to see and experience.
A couple of key areas. You've got the macroeconomic environment which I talked about, which is interest rates have traditionally, a little on the rise at the moment, but they have been low, and access to capital has been fairly easy in the scheme of things historically. All of that enables new solutions to thrive and new innovations to come to market that will continue to elevate healthtech in the overall market.
Generally, just the acceleration of technologies supporting the need for greater access and delivery of healthcare which we touched on. I think specifically, artificial intelligence and maybe robotics process automation will come together in a few areas that really support what we call the educated consumer in healthcare.
Use of AI to make really informed decisions based on massive data analytics around patient outcomes. We can study that when you give someone a certain treatment at a certain point in time, how has that influenced an outcome? Before having access to all of that data, those types of analyses were not possible.
Running platforms against electronic records, which really, again, might suggest different potential therapies for individuals. AI is really a big thing and I think consumers are wanting and asking for more. The big rub in all of this is, as we want more, we think we've already paid for it because we're paying our insurance premiums. But have those insurance premiums really paid for all of these new discoveries, innovations, etc? So that's the interesting rub.
