Healthcare Trends To Look Out For

We’re in what’s shaping up to be the most transformative decade in the modern history of healthcare. New innovations are coming thick and fast throughout the sector, not only in the fields of medicine and treatments, but also in the way we access, analyse and even pay for healthcare.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the major trends expected to redefine the shape of global healthcare this year, and beyond.

5 healthcare trends to look out for

The global healthcare industry grew from US$7.5 trillion to US$7.9 trillion between 2022 to 2023, and is expected to tip over the US$8 trillion mark this year. Despite complications brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and global conflict (which include labour shortages and rising supply line costs), the sector has remained afloat thanks mainly to fast-moving technological innovations.

These are helping healthcare professionals to not only provide high-quality services to a greater number of people around the world, they are also raising the standard of treatments for a wide range of conditions.

1/ AI in healthcare

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been developing rapidly over the last few decades – but in 2023, it finally hit the mainstream. Now it is having a profound impact on the world and fast becoming a part of our everyday lives. This year, AI is expected to become an essential tool for healthcare professionals too.

AI will demonstrate its potential to improve healthcare through such means as accelerating data analysis, reducing the time taken to conduct administrative tasks and providing more accurate results. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has already started to integrate AI into a number of its own pipelines, including:

• Radiology – where AI supports radiologists to make faster and more accurate assessments by quickly and intelligently analysing X-rays to look for signs and symptoms
• Brain scanning – where AI has again been integrated to speed up the process of monitoring and diagnosis
• Virtual wards – which have been created to allow doctors to treat patients in their own homes, while AI helps to monitor their health and respond to their needs

Not only does AI promise to offer faster and more accurate results for a number of complex treatments, through a process of continuous learning it can also gain more insight into individual patients with a view towards providing more personalised treatments.

Healthcare professionals even believe that, by creating advanced models of their patients, AI may be able to identify diseases before they start to display symptoms, leading to better outcomes. AI can also help to reduce healthcare costs, making treatment more accessible (Deloitte predicts AI will create savings of US$360 billion across the US healthcare sector over the next five years).

While some of these outcomes may still be a few years away from materialising, these AI-powered innovations are fast becoming a reality:

• Improved patient outcomes as AI becomes integrated into the diagnostic process, for instance, by crunching large amounts of data to search for anomalies, improving the odds of early diagnosis
• Reduced pressure on knowledge workers in the healthcare sector (e.g. hospital administrators) leading to improved time-to-treatment, faster data-sharing and fewer administrative traffic jams
• Faster clinical trials, as drug synthesisers implement AI as a way to design, monitor and control their trials, we can expect to see faster and more effective outputs from pharmaceutical companies

It’s difficult to predict all the ways AI will disrupt the healthcare industry, but one thing’s for sure: you’re guaranteed to see it grabbing headlines for some time to come.

2/ Generative AI virtual assistants

As well as AI having a profound effect on the behind-the-scenes world of healthcare, patients can also expect to see artificial intelligence during the course of their treatment. This will be down to the rise of Generative AI (language-driven AI models, such as chatbots) entering the healthcare sector en-masse.

One way patients might start to interact with AI chatbots is at the first point of contact. Chatbots are starting to be used to supplement the roles of nurses and general practitioners at the earliest stages of the patient journey, by gathering information, analysing data and forming hypotheses.

With near-instant access to the entire compendium of medical knowledge, generative AI takes much of the legwork out of the diagnostic process, helping practitioners arrive at firm conclusions faster, thus saving time and resources. It also helps administrators to prioritise patients according to the most urgent need.

Another field that is being rapidly changed by generative AI is mental health. AI chatbots are already being trained to perform complex therapy, including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychotherapy. As such, patients can now access a variety of AI-driven tools offering mental health support.

These chatbots can also gather patient data and look for trends (for instance, changes in mood) to provide support at critical moments. AI-powered therapy is still in its infancy, but we may soon be seeing these kinds of programs hit the mainstream.

Overall, the key benefits of generative AI in healthcare will be:

• Improving the efficiency of healthcare professionals by removing some of the administrative burden, meaning more patients can be seen
• Offering patients better access to treatment, by allowing them to consult services from their phones or home computer rather than attending a healthcare practice
• Improving efficacy rates in treatment, with more accurate diagnoses and a generally lower risk of mis-diagnosis

3/ Improved care for the elderly

The global median age continues to rise. In 2024, it stood at 30.7 years, up from 30.4 in 2023. This number is expected to continue rising over the next century, up to around 42 years in 2100.

Median global age (2014-2025)

Source: database.earth

An ageing global population presents many challenges to the healthcare sector. With older people more at risk of degenerative diseases and less able to care for themselves, healthcare facilities are having to adapt to a world in which more people than ever are going to start to require long-term care.

Thankfully, a number of emerging trends promise to help the world cope with this rising demand.

Firstly, we should expect to see new treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. With over 55 million people globally living with Alzheimer’s, and 8.5 million with Parkinson’s, these diseases account for almost 4% of all deaths in the world. This year, new drugs such as lecanemab, donanemab and remternetug for Alzheimer’s and produodopa for Parkinson’s are set to enter the market, potentially helping to reduce this rate.

Another big trend will be in the elderly care sector. Using learnings from previous generations and the COVID-19 pandemic, elderly care housing developers are adapting and optimising elderly peoples’ housing to meet changing needs, bringing health services on-site and updating their care routines with the introduction of wearable health trackers that enable nurses to respond quickly and more accurately to patients’ needs.

Furthermore, a growing shift away from communal elderly living towards at-home care will not only see an easing of pressure on assisted living accommodation, but will open up the opportunity for elderly care patients to remain independent into old age.

In short, we can expect to see elderly care benefit from both improvements in pharmaceuticals and a shift towards more flexibility in the care sector, perhaps reducing the burden that an ageing global population may otherwise have put on the healthcare sector.

4/ Personalised medicine

Historically, medical professionals have tended to take a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine, prescribing medications based on a patient’s signs and symptoms, and prescribing drugs that have treated that instance of a disease well in the past.

However, we may start to see personalised, or precision medicine become the new normal. Benefitting from the completion of the human genome project, plus recent advances into data gathering through wearable devices and of course artificial intelligence to crunch the data, pharmaceutical scientists are now preparing a range of flexible, adaptable medications that are not only capable of treating diseases, but also responding to the unique genetic make-up of each individual to make treatment more effective.

Personalised medicine has the potential to improve efficacy rates of medication, reduce the risk of side-effects and may even open the door to treating diseases that were previously untreatable.

Personalised medicine is also being adapted to preventative medicine too, meaning doctors will soon be able to reduce the risk of disease and lessen the need to provide more advanced treatment further down the line.

Personalised medicine is an ongoing field of research, so it may be a while before it hits the mainstream. But with multiple pharmaceutical companies already experimenting with this field of medicine, expect to see news of successful treatments emerging.

5/ Digital twins

Another huge technological development we will be certainly hearing about is the rise of the digital twin.

In the most basic terms, a digital twin is a simulation of a physical artefact. In the healthcare sector, this could mean the simulation of a hospital environment, of an entire person, or – going deeper down – of a selected part of a person’s anatomy, their cellular structure, or an isolated entity such as a tumour.

Digital twins are created using the same data used to define the physical entity. For instance, in the case of a person, a digital twin may draw on big data sources such as that person’s unique DNA sequence. The digital twin can then be constructed in a virtual space with the help of artificial intelligence.

The benefit of having a digital twin is that it allows for analysis and experimentation without consequence. For instance, if a doctor wanted to understand how best to surgically remove a tumour, they could construct a digital twin of the patient and their tumour, then experiment with solutions without affecting the patient. Once they have discovered a methodology that works on the digital twin of the tumour, they could perform the same operation on the physical twin, now with a higher chance of success.

The concept of ‘digital twins’ has been around since the early 2000s. However, we should expect to see the practice used more widely within healthcare, helped by recent advances in artificial technology, which are making it easier to translate big data such as DNA sequencing into digital systems.

Healthcare professionals can also expect to see digital twins of their hospital and clinical environments, through which they will be able to simulate such events as patient flows, in order to optimise these processes.

Digital twins could offer far-reaching benefits for healthcare, helping experts in the fields of precision diagnosis, personalised treatments and generally providing more efficient and effective service.

Conclusion

As you’ve probably noticed, many of the biggest trends expected to define healthcare come as a result of artificial intelligence.

At a time when the global healthcare sector is impacted by rising supply line costs, cyber-security risks and a shortage of labour, AI is helping to make up the shortfall while also improving the overall standard of healthcare treatment worldwide.

This could prove a turning point for the healthcare sector, as we start to see not only more effective treatments, but faster delivery too. The end result could be a gradual easing of pressure on healthcare sector employees, from doctors and nurses to hospital administrators and pharmaceutical workers.

The best healthcare, anywhere in the world

William Russell’s international health insurance policy gives you and your family access to first-class medical care while you are living abroad.

With over 40,000 medical treatment centres in our network, you can be sure you’re always receiving the highest standard of care. Our flexible policies allow you to find a health insurance policy – and a price – to suit your needs.

Get a quote today in under two minutes, and start to enjoy healthcare that’s always on the cutting edge.