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Trends in the Medtech during the Pandemic: smash or pass?

I’m Dmitry Krupsky, my colleagues from Globosphere Russia and I have been working in the medical technology market for the second year. Our company was created specifically for the needs of the market, and we came here with a clear understanding of its prospects.

In recent years, the medtech sector has been considered by investors, and the governments of many countries, promising - and they looked at it as a good platform for long-term investments. Therefore, our investors decided to launch a project in Russia specifically tailored to the information revolution in medicine.

The trends of medical technology in recent years have set the stage for the explosive growth of IT in medicine. But, apparently, in connection with the coronacrisis, the transition to the medicine of the future will happen faster than we all thought. Not only because there is a sharp redistribution of investor interests right now - oil and gold markets, for example, are of little interest to them.But also because over the past few months, immediately a number of technologies that developed sluggishly due to the inertia of the system quickly became needed.

We will talk about several technologies that are now receiving a very powerful impetus in development. Will they show explosive growth in the coming years - or fail the coronacrisis test of strength?

Telemedicine: smash


In Russia, the law on telemedicine entered into force only at the beginning of 2018 - and so far, remote consultations of doctors have not been very common. In the USA, this area began to develop 10 years earlier, but even there global transformation did not happen during this time - people preferred to talk with doctors in person.

Now we are forced to acquire completely different habits. Inevitably, online consultations become habitual for the most conservative ones - there are practically no alternatives. Today, hospitals and clinics accept only people with serious illnesses, and mild cases of acute respiratory viral infections, exacerbations of chronic diseases, strange skin rashes and the like troubles - all this becomes the area of ​​responsibility of telemedicine. Even sick leave can already be issued online. Surely, many people will appreciate how convenient it is - and after quarantine ends, they will continue to choose remote consultations in case of mild health problems.


Source: mos.ru. In the telemedicine center of the Moscow Department of Health

At the telemedicine center of the Moscow Department of Health, which advises patients with a mild form of coronavirus, in March alone they performed 12,000 remote appointments. Medsi , the largest player in the Russian commercial medicine market, recorded a double increase in video consultations.

In Russia, the development of telemedicine has long been constrained by legislative restrictions - for example, it was impossible to make an initial diagnosis without an in-person visit to a doctor. But right now we are seeing how the main barriers to the spread of telemedicine are collapsing. In the midst of a pandemic, MPs introduced a new bill .“In an emergency and (or) when there is a threat of spreading a disease that poses a danger to others, the government has the right to establish other features and procedures for the provision of medical care, including using telemedicine technologies,” it says. This means that the ban on diagnosis can be removed remotely - and this already opens up completely new opportunities for telemedicine.

Remote Pharmaceuticals: pass?


The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the law on the remote sale of drugs. The lawmaker allowed the online sale of OTC drugs on an ongoing basis, and due to the spread of the virus, it temporarily allowed the online sale of certain prescription drugs. This permission will be valid until December 31.

It can be assumed that this will form a new big market and a new layer of big data, additional services will appear. But judging by the number of disagreements of the State Duma and the Ministry of Health, the case will not soon take a serious turn.

Drug delivery is a niche service, many logistical problems, it is unprofitable and increases the price of goods. Perhaps this will be popular during a pandemic, because people have no alternatives - but then the trend may roll back.

Artificial Intelligence and Big Data: smash


A scattering of cases immediately demonstrates the benefits of AI during a pandemic. Here are just a few examples.

Company BenevolentAI uses artificial intelligence to create cures for serious diseases. A few weeks after the outbreak of coronavirus, the manufacturer tuned the system to select existing drugs that could help against the virus.

Canadian startup BlueDot reported a possible hotbed of a new epidemic before WHO, relying on data from a news feed. Today, the Canadian government is already using the services of the system to monitor the spread of the pandemic and make forecasts.


Source : bluedot.global

systemartificial intelligence developed by Chinese technology company Baidu, equipped with an infrared sensor and artificial intelligence to determine people's body temperature. It allows you to determine the forehead temperature in 200 people in 1 minute with an accuracy of 0.5 º. The system warns authorities if it detects a person with a temperature above 37.3 degrees Celsius.

The trend is gaining momentum in the Russian medtech market. Algorithms are still at the experimental stage, but some of them show interesting results.

The startup “Third Opinion” installed a system for operational monitoring of the quality of patient care using artificial intelligence in KB No. 1 .
The neural network records the frequency of visits by medical staff, the patient’s condition according to the position of his body, allows you to remotely contact him. Also, the developers additionally trained the neural network to recognize the presence of personal protective equipment by a health worker. The decision allowed to reduce the cost overrun of PPE and reduce the risk of infection by reducing the visits of medical staff to infected.

We, in turn, continue to work on medical record technologynew generation. It will accumulate information about analyzes, appointments, medical history, numbers from wearable devices - as well as analyze all this huge data array, find patterns and give recommendations. A beta version of the map in Russia should appear in 2021. According to a marketing study, within 5 years after its release, about 10 million people in Russia and the CIS will become its users. Given the events that occurred during the pandemic, we are changing the forecast upward.


Working data visualization concept

in the report of the World Health Organization, published in February, stated that AI and big data is a key solution to the problem with the Chinese disease.

Thus, right now, AI technologies not only help doctors and medical officials make decisions, but also allow you to monitor the quality of doctors' work, calculate and distribute the load on the medical system.

The development of these technologies was hindered, as a rule, by the difficulty of obtaining the medical data themselves. People feared for their private data - medical histories, genetic tests and analyzes - for example, fearing that the information could be used against them by insurance companies, banks, employers and even the state. And the states themselves were afraid to give data about their residents to developers from other countries - what if they use this to create biological weapons?

Pandemic - a kind of wake up call for all of us. Ordinary people realized that information about them would rather help save their life than play against them, being in the hands of unscrupulous entrepreneurs. And the states, faced with the collapse of their medical systems and the inability to accurately predict the development of events, became interested in creating systems of national monitoring of the state of citizens - those based on artificial intelligence, big data and therefore exclude the possibility of human error.

Coronavirus united people and countries. We are ready to give any kind of information, if only we would soon develop a vaccine or medicine and remove quarantine measures. And this will definitely spur the development of AI technologies in medicine.

Gadgets and devices: smash


During the pandemic, the role of smart gadgets in medicine began to grow rapidly. Created for the development of the national technological initiative, the
ANO Platform “NTI” invited the Russian government to support a number of medical projects in this direction. In particular, the LANIT-Integration company is already testing in Moscow’s main coronavirus center - City Clinical Hospital No. 40 (Kommunarka) - smart glasses, a system for remotely coordinating the actions of physicians. And the new generation of fitness bracelets (Hilby bracelet), as conceived by the authors of the project, will allow the doctor to remotely monitor the health of the quarantined person - and call an ambulance if necessary.


Source:www.lanit.ru/projects/pilotnoe-vnedrenie-sistemy-udalyennoy-koordinatsii-deystviy-personala-meditsinskikh-statsionarov-mos

Well, quite predictably, we ourselves will become more interested in our health - and, as a result, we will spend more on wearable devices. IDC predicts a 30 percent growth in the wearable device segment with a physical measurement function for the full year 2020.

Application instead of a doctor: pass


To summarize all of the above, we can assume that medicine in the near future will look like this. A person is hung up with a bunch of gadgets - they measure the pulse, oxygen content in the blood and heart rate variability, respiratory rate, sugar level, etc. The system based on artificial intelligence constantly analyzes the incoming data - and if it suspects the onset of problems, it signals the patient. Then a person contacts telemedicine with a doctor - and receives recommendations for analysis and treatment. It turns out that living doctors will soon cease to be needed at all - well, or perhaps for research and operations, where they will also be replaced by robots over time?

Maybe it will be so - but certainly not in the near future, not in the long term 5-10 years. Technologies, of course, will take over part of the work - they will primarily unload the nursing staff, which, by the way, is in great shortage because of the rapidly aging population. A report from the British Royal College of Nursing indicated a shortage of 40,000 nurses in England 2 years ago.

They will free up time for doctors, which is now spent on filling out cards - and then they will be able to pay more attention to diagnosis, to good contact with the patient. It is unlikely that the medical profession will soon be a thing of the past, but the quality of the services provided by doctors is likely to increase.

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