We designed this e-book to serve as a collection of relevant examples, best practices and exciting ideas that can help any pharmaceutical company prepare for change. Many pharma companies have been trying to hop on the “digital train”. This e-book was meant to prove that instead of a train of innovation, stakeholders should think in terms of spaceships and while there is still time to embrace digital health and patient empowerment, those that do it faster will get exponentially ahead of their competitors.

In the last couple of years, artificial intelligence moved from being a futuristic promise into a reference point for innovation. The technology also started to transform healthcare with great vigor. It’s high time to talk about what artificial intelligence brings to medicine.

• What do machine learning, deep learning, or convolutional networks mean?
• What are the most affected medical fields?
• What are the greatest challenges for applying smart algorithms to healthcare settings?
• What could the future bring?
• What are the top use cases for artificial intelligence in healthcare?
• What are the benefits of the exchange of knowledge between humans and machines?
• What social and ethical implications do we need to address?

Read The Medical Futurist’s guide to understand what you can anticipate from AI in healthcare and how to control this technology.

• Understand: Get a clear overview of the key concepts.
• Anticipate: Learn how to identify the opportunities and use cases of AI in healthcare and medicine.
• Control: Recognize and act upon the risks and implications of artificial intelligence.

In previous years, The Medical Futurist published annual e-books about digital health trends regarding potential developments that were worth keeping an eye on for that particular year. Based on our analyses and forecasts, these trends help give a bigger picture regarding the direction that the field was heading towards during that year; even though not all forecasts came to fruition.

This current e-book also shares our insights about noteworthy trends based on similar analyses. However, unlike our previous annual trends e-books, we do not restrict ourselves to a current year but look at the short-term future now, with the developments likely to happen in the next 2-5 years. Moreover, we don’t only focus on these insights but also help in providing context about those trends and relevant technologies in general.

In this book, we elaborate on 20 trends that we have been constantly monitoring and that we believe will have the most importance in shaping the digital health landscape in the near future:

1. Patient empowerment is the biggest milestone in the history of medicine
2. Lifestyle medicine is the redesign primary care has needed
3. Globalised healthcare brings precision medicine to life
4. Pharma companies & digital health: packaging a medication with a digital health service
5. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing has an edge in drug sensitivity
6. Nutrigenomics is the biggest promise of digital health
7. Food scanners are lagging behind
8. ECG devices have led the regulatory race for portable diagnostic devices
9. A.I.-guided portable ultrasound devices are the unicorns of digital health
10. The conscious health consumer of the future uses sensors and loses privacy
11. Virtual visits and chatbots represent the new primary care
12. Artificial Intelligence needs a prospective upgrade and the video game industry can help
13. Bioprinting: It is possible to bioprint living tissues but not organs
14. 3D printing can customize treatments and supplement the medical supply chain
15. The automation race defines whether A.I. can outperform physicians
16. COVID-19 has catalyzed technological adoption, but not the cultural one
17. Mixed reality can transform virtual meetings and medical education
18. Virtual reality can help ease pain for patients in the hospital
19. Robots only roam rich hospitals and pharmacies
20. Digital health insurance companies will have no competitors

Each section contains an aspect that we wanted to highlight about that technology or trend based on our analyses by studying the field for years. We also walk you through that area with relevant descriptions and examples that we find interesting. Additionally, we include further reading suggestions at the end of every section which you can turn to so as to dive deeper into the subject.

Big tech companies like Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Apple, IBM and Microsoft are taking their move into healthcare and medicine seriously. They are developing new, health-related features on their platforms. They are also teaming up with research institutions and developers to create new tools for patients, doctors and other stakeholder in medicine – and they are heavily investing in partnerships with start-ups or launching new ventures. This guide details how and why the move of the big tech companies happens to healthcare.