In this segment from Motley Fool Live, recorded on Feb. 17, Deloitte Managing Director Heather Gates shares her thoughts on some of the main challenges that healthtech companies are facing today.
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: The key challenges, as I think about them, are really addressing three areas. Access to healthcare, addressing health equity, that's a big issue that we all talk about, and addressing the social determinations of health. What is it that's driving a disproportionate number of issues in a certain population rather than others?
The second area of focus that we think about is affordability, so the cost of care. As we all know, healthcare in the U.S. has gone up substantially in the past few decades, but we have the competing focus of the demands of the consumer. We've gotten a taste of what we can have, what we want to see, what we want more of. We as consumers will continue to drive additional needs and requests of things that we'd like to see.
You've got the issue of reimbursement with the insurance companies, that's always a challenge. How do you get alignment with emerging solutions, with the regulatory environment, and the insurance companies? Really scaling telehealth. How do you deal with any regulatory and reimbursement challenges around telehealth.
Then finally you've just got the overall market shifts. You have consolidation of traditional market participants which I've talked about. You've seen some large mergers as of late. You also have competition from big, I would call raw tech companies. Think of your brand name, huge tech company and they're delving into this segment. Is a health angle going to beat out a healthcare angle? It remains to be seen.
Then finally you've got an emergence of a lot of global entrants. There's a lot of IT being created in places like Israel, some areas in Europe. If you just think about the overall scale of China and the impact of that population, they come up with solutions. There's a lot of competition and a lot of coopetition that can take place.
