By STEPHANIE KUKU, MD and HUGH HARVEY, MBBS

The ability to predict in healthcare is the utopia promised by every artificial intelligence for healthcare built, funded and tested in the last decade. Yet very few doctors, technologists, or investors would have imagined they would live to witness a pandemic of the scale we are currently experiencing. We are still getting our heads round the lives lost, the lives of the frontline workers at risk, the disruption and self-isolation, the less fortunate who will suffer the most, the companies in survival mode, and a battered global economy. It is a good time to reflect on what the future of health will look like after we recover. We need to get better at acting on the predictions that truly matter. In a booming health-tech market saturated with promises of predictions and diagnostic insights, it’s a shame we didn’t listen to the scientists who predicted this violent wave of viral disruption. 

The future of healthcare investing needs to change

With the first case of the virus last December, everything changed, and there is so much more change to come, in healthcare, technology and in the way we all work.  Like with policy and public health, the majority of players on the healthcare stage remain so far removed from the frontline. The perceived ‘market’ rarely truly represents the real one, and true intelligence is lacking the collective intelligence that should prioritise the needs of the healthcare systems and the populations they serve. Our values, motives and how we create the pitch-perfect melting pot of skills, expertise, and mindset needs readjustment. Somewhere between evidence- based decision making and patience; clinical impact aligned with economic impact should be the goal. More focus is needed on validation and less on valuations that are largely built on assumptions and unproven hypotheses. Given the amount of investment that has drowned the healthtech/biotech domains in the last decade, we must praise the advancements that have been made. We must also examine the failures, the wasted resources, and whether technology really is moving healthcare forward at a pace that matches the investment.