Analysing the impact of Covid-19 on UK health tech adoption – December 2020

Covid-19 has clearly had a huge and long-lasting impact on the health sector. The scale of transformation through 2020 has been unprecedented and technology has, of course, been front and centre of these rapid developments. Based on independent analysis by TechMarketView – the full analysis can be found here – this infographic details where we […]

Covid-19 has clearly had a huge and long-lasting impact on the health sector. The scale of transformation through 2020 has been unprecedented and technology has, of course, been front and centre of these rapid developments.

Based on independent analysis by TechMarketView – the full analysis can be found here – this infographic details where we have seen the biggest impact from Covid-19 on the UK healthcare tech sector, outlines the technologies and tools leading the charge, and explores the trends we can expect to see over the coming years.

Enabled by cloud

Commenting on the analysis and the fact that cloud is at the heart of growth in healthcare technology, Tim Jarvis, Cloud Evangelist at Agilisys said: “As the government and private sectors have had to deal with Covid-19 and the impact to operations, the health sector has needed to establish new ways in which to serve citizens. We are seeing a growing market and maturity in services that leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) in what is fast becoming the Internet of Medical Things (or IoT for Healthcare).

“The development of Healthcare specific applications, internet connected devices, wearables etc., coupled with advances in AI and machine-to-machine learning, has transformed the way services are being delivered. One example is telemedicine and the remote proactive monitoring of patients and IoT enabled facilities within homes providing relevant data back to a central database where medical professionals are enabling real time dashboards and proactive alerts.

“Cloud has become the enabler, offering a scalable and secure platform across the broad range of services and solutions that this sector needs. Of course, personal data and the sharing of an individual’s conditions will remain a primary concern, though one could expect, with the focus on data security from the major cloud providers, that over time many people will consider the benefits to outweigh the concerns.”

Data must be treated as a strategic asset

As outlined by TechMarketView in its analysis, data is a catalyst for adoption of new technologies at pace. However, while Covid-19 has laid bare the critical importance of rapid, evidence-based decision making in times of crisis, the ever-evolving nature of the pandemic has highlighted just how slow and unwieldy data systems and insight generating reports can be faced with new challenges.

“To provide the insights needed to make life-saving interventions during the pandemic, a swathe of manual, duplicated and time-consuming data gathering exercises were set up within teams and organisations; across sectors and geographies; and eventually to national departments. This all had to happen before a single insight had been generated, with delays leaving decisionmakers blind. This need not be the case,” explained Ben Scully, Senior Consultant in the Data & Insights Practice at Agilisys.

While felt most keenly during the crisis, this problem is not new, and solutions are to hand for those seeking to treat data as a strategic asset, akin to people, technology and financial capital. It is this shift in mindset that is the critical next step in transforming access to, and exploitation of, data driven insights that, in turn, will drive the success of the acceleration in health tech adoption that we’ve witnessed as a result of Covid-19.