Maximising innovation opportunities in digital medicine

Digital medicine is a vast discipline encompassing many interconnected elements. It’s also growing and evolving at pace as the sophisticated technologies behind it become more affordable and accessible. A Global Market Insights report published in March 2023 projects that the wider digital health market will experience a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15% between 2023 and 2032, to reach USD 981.5 Billion.

The term ‘digital medicine’ is perhaps overused, covering a wide range of health-related digital technologies. At Sagentia Innovation, we adhere to the definition centred on “evidence-based solutions that use software and algorithmically driven products to measure or intervene to improve human health.”

From a patient perspective, this is about health promotion and disease prevention. From a wider healthcare perspective, it’s about supporting health research and the practice of medicine.

Whatever definition you use, innovation prospects within this fertile landscape are immense. Digital medicine offers ways to improve patient experiences and outcomes while making healthcare systems more effective and efficient. It also presents opportunities to drive the transition from ‘sick care’ to true ‘health care’, empowering people to maintain good health and facilitating earlier interventions to prevent illness.

Yet the vast, complex, and dynamic nature of digital medicine can make it hard to identify technically feasible and commercially viable concepts.

To help companies navigate this exciting and potentially lucrative space, we’ve created a Digital Medicine Landscaping Tool. It’s an interactive taxonomy of digital medicine which encompasses measurement and intervention cycles for a comprehensive range of prevention, detection, and intervention episodes. It details patient need, intervention function, and enabling classes of technologies which measure and leverage data to enable care. The goal is to map the opportunity space at a high level for rapid evaluation and roadmap planning by R&D teams.

Benefits of the Digital Medicine Landscaping Tool

Patient pathways run through the tool, and it is designed to facilitate patient-centric solutions. It identifies measurement-intervention cycles to satisfy various objectives such as providing reassurance, minimising central hospital visits, reinforcing healthy behaviours, and more.

Companies already active in digital medicine can use the tool to audit current solutions and identify opportunities to add further value in specific areas. An existing diagnostic solution for at-home use might be enhanced to offer patients prevention lifestyle guidance. Or healthcare professionals might be empowered with new intervention capabilities via procedure monitoring and planning to support evidence-based treatment and best practice.

For R&D teams developing new digital medicine solutions, the tool makes it easier to identify a greater range of potential measurement-intervention concepts early in the design process. This allows more ideas to be hypothesised and interrogated upfront, with the strongest progressed for development.

Identifying enabling technologies

The tool also aids the identification of enabling technologies which can be combined in different ways to deliver value according to defined needs and objectives. They are grouped into five overarching categories...

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