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.

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.

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 during the next decade?
• 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 A.I. 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 potential use cases of A.I. in healthcare and medicine.
• Control: Recognize and act upon the risks and implications of artificial intelligence.

Along with the enhanced healthcare landscape that digital health brings along like remote care, A.I. tools or 3D printing, there is the pressing issue of privacy. How secure is secure data? Is my health data on my smartphone/fitness device safe? Can Google, Amazon, or Facebook buy my health records from my hospital? Can I have an influence on who in the hospital can see and read my records? Today, everyone needs to understand that there is no digital health without sacrificing a part of our privacy. The advanced technologies fueling the transformation cannot improve without our data; and without it they can’t be implemented as part of regular medical care. And COVID-19 has only made things worse.

In the age of digital health, it’s not a question of whether we should do this but how we can do it in a way that protects what is valuable and vulnerable. 

Such a discussion is at the centerpiece of our new e-book “Privacy In The Digital Health Era: What You Need To Know.” In it, we describe the three cornerstones of privacy of every privacy discussion going forward: the traditional, the new and the future spheres that deal with your health data, and put forward recommendations on how you can start protecting yourself.

Privacy and security issues pertaining to the digital health era are complex and multifactorial. These aren’t likely to get any simpler as more and more advanced technologies get integrated into the field. As such, every stakeholder in the healthcare landscape must contemplate the need for change – yourself included.

At The Medical Futurist, we don’t usually deal with investment-related news and announcements. We never share investment rounds or press releases coming from incubators and venture capital firms.

However, it doesn’t mean that we don’t keep a close eye on all these developments.

Moreover, the mission we stand by indicates that we actively support the digital health and artificial intelligence start-up community; we are in close contact with many founders and we do share news and contexts that those incubators use.

The pandemic has just made this involvement even more prominent in our work. Good digital health investments these days cannot only provide a more optimistic vision for healthcare, but can shape how we deal with COVID-19 too.

So, it was time to share how we assess the quality and promise of digital health and A.I. start-ups and technologies; how we make a decision whether to feature a report or announcement on our channels; and how in general we try to make sense of all the changes around healthcare when it comes to investments.

We shared those 24 technological trends we find the most promising by also highlighting some specific areas that are worth following. And we included good and bad examples of the past couple of years about investment stories.

I hope you will find our publication a useful addition to the toolset of investors to find the next big thing in digital health and A.I. that can make the lives of patients and the job of medical professionals better.

Every medical specialty will transform differently due to the technological revolution. On certain fields, such as nursing, psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology, innovation will have much less impact than on dentistry, cardiology or pathology. In this e-book we specify in detail how the appearance of artificial intelligence, sensors, wearables, VR/AR or robots affect each medical specialty in order to be able to discern what skills physicians will need in the future.

We aim to show how physicians of the various professions can successfully prepare for the sweeping changes coming with the waves of technology. We want to go against the fears that artificial intelligence, robots or any other innovative solutions will take over doctors’ jobs. While digital technologies certainly have the capacity to take over administrative tasks, organizational processes or even simpler diagnostic steps, the expertise of medical professionals is irreplaceable. Especially if they recognize that their jobs can be much more efficient, creative or even fun if they embrace digital technologies. At the moment, as these innovations are still in the early days of their usage, that doesn’t always seem so.

However, we are certain that technologies will unburden doctors, nurses and other medical professionals in the long run, especially if they learn in time how to cooperate with technologies successfully. Here’s our guide on how to do that.