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Where Should Healthcare Industry go Forward? 10 per cent of health insurance plans will be linked to lifestyle and health data-driven interactive policies in some form by the end of 2019

By Sugandha Aggarwal

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

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Technology plays a vital role in everything and every industry across the globe — yet healthcare lags behind. "Technology is solving real problems, some of them trivial, some pretty serious, but it feels a little odd that we're not applying it into the world of health,"

During 2019, the application of digital health will continue to go far beyond the traditional system and empower individuals to be able to manage their own health. Based on our estimates, it is expected that digital health tech catering to out of hospital settings will grow by 30 per cent to cross $25 billion market globally by the end of 2019. Increasing cost burden from chronic health conditions and aging population will be the chief driver for digital health solutions such as RPM devices, tele-health platforms, PERS, and mHealth applications. Furthermore, favorable reimbursement policies towards clinically relevant digital health applications will continue to expand care delivery models beyond physical medicine to include behavioural health, digital wellness therapies, dentistry, nutrition, and prescription management.

Are Health insurance Up to the Mark

There is no denial that health insurance policies available today are aged and often fail to meet the personalised needs of individuals. As a result, the health insurance industry is expected to see less than 1.5per cent growth during 2019. To ensure future growth globally a number of insurance companies are already providing data and digital-driven healthcare services to their policyholders to personalize the experience and reduce the cost from potential claims. Entailing this we believe, 5-10 per cent of health insurance plans will be linked to lifestyle and health data-driven interactive policies in some form by the end of 2019.

New Technology Changing the Game

Now days healthcare sector is transforming rapidly in terms of technologies like AI, SaaS, IoT etc making treatment easy and effective but we are still lacking behind providing the basic medical needs. Health sector should be focusing on providing medical assistance in rural areas where medical treatment is not available. Many country's rural areas are facing huge crisis in term of medical treatment, medical transportation, medicines and hospitals due to which there are great loss of lives. In order to solve these issues we should connect people staying far from medical reach by providing them single stop solution that can accommodate their every need like appointments in prime hospitals, medical transportation, guest house stays.

Healthcare should be more comforting and smart in order to provide hassle free environment to people. Storing the patient data on cloud and with the use of AI, predicting the health issue client can face in order to take early precautions. Use of technologies like AI, SaaS, IoT can provide accurate and fast medical reports and can perform medical treatment which reduces the cost and time. Health sector should be more into preventing rather than reactive. Doctors should be provided with better equipment and technologies that can enable them to predicts the patient health and can perform necessary treatment in order to prevent it.

2019-20 will definitely be an exciting year for healthcare; be prepared for some major transformations and new entrants in the market!

Sugandha Aggarwal

Founder of Docttocare

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