Catherine Boule, Karista’s Managing Partner, shared her valuable thoughts on the trends that we can expect in the digital health industry for 2021 during a Invivox Academy Session on the 11/12/2020.

Inspired by the TED’s model and as a player in the digitalization of health the Invivox Academy provides a series of “TALKs” for health industry in a short and impactful format and aims to bring a better understand of the important role of digital technologies in the Healthcare industry.

The Digital Healthcare Industry gained an interest in Europe around 2015, and became more popular during 2017/2018. It is a sector relatively new in our part of the world if we compare ourselves to the United States of America which have been involved in its problematics since 2010.
In Europe and in America, this sector is experiencing an unabated growth with various application, such as Doctolib, participating greatly in the digitalization of the industry.

It is a very broad and diverse ecosystem, including for instance issues related to well-being and prevention, the patient journey as well as innovations in digital therapy, with its own specificities. Digital Healthcare is a very heterogeneous sector with a very wide range of applications and markets. The place of health data is essential and the difficulty of accessing it is a major issue. Due to its relative youth, the economic models dealing with this industry are still to be built and validated, and there are very few benchmarks for exits. In addition, there is a great disparity of health systems in the world and particularly in Europe, which makes the go-to-market complicated. Furthermore, it is a field that remains a world of experts operating in regulated and fragmented markets, which makes its digitalization particularly complex.

At Karista we believe that these observations point to opportunities. Start-ups bring a new, different and valuable perspective to actors which are very open to their innovate solutions. Furthermore, its recent worldwide expansion clearly reveals a global need affecting everyone at almost the same time.

As it is an exploding industry, it is important to constantly question its development. The issues of quality and robustness of the technologies are particularly important due to the sensitivity of the health field. One should also be guarded against the tendency for companies to inflate prices without demonstrated success and a constant creation of buzz words without a real understanding of what they encompass (AI, Big Data, Block Chain, deep learning, etc.).

At Karista we have made Digital Health one of our areas of expertise and we are very happy to be implicated in its developement.

The replay of the Invivox Academy Session is available here (video in French).

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