Every cloud (hic… adversity) has a silver lining!

Corona pandemic, in its wake of ghoulish devastation, also brought certain windfall gains to the MedTech industry, and more specifically to invitro diagnostics (IVD) industry. The latter is expected to grow a whopping more than 50 percent over its USD 50 billion turnover in 2011 to USD 77 billion in 2022. In a country like India, with rampant pollution and smoked tobacco on the rise, respiratory care devices seem to be leading the pack in growth of MedTech devices, with a CAGR of 8.7 percent. The imperatives of forced ostracization of the Corona pandemic, as also the realization of the saving of time, energy, and money by adopting domiciliary and point-of-care testing has ensured that the reticence of the medical fraternity, as also of the laity, to adoption of digital technologies has waned. Advances in technology, automation of work processes, with consequent expediency and convenience and aggressive D2C model of marketing with healthy competition, have all hauled together to fuel this growth.

Moving forward, pharmaco­genomics is going to be the holy grail with a view to personalized and targeted nano-technology-based therapeutics and digitally enabled point-of-care diagnostics. Healthcare ecosystems are changing and evolving, and artificial intelligence, big data analytics, virtual and augmented reality are all drivers of future growth in the MedTech industry. Adding to the impetus, the venture capitalists, who have traditionally shied away from investing in MedTech, have since seen a change in their mindset, and are viewing it optimistically, providing the much-needed financial resources.

Challenges
The challenges are mundane – privacy, data security, insurance, and reimbursement issues, and lastly the reluctance of the human mind to change (there are green shoots of this changing). Costs too are an issue till mass adoption takes place and economy of scales kick in. Here, the digital divide across gender, elderly, and the underprivileged, who in fact are the most vulnerable groups and need these technologies more than anyone else, may play the spoilsport. Bundled testing and overzealous picking-up of asymptomatic and inconsequential disease may bring in negative press and harm. Outcomes data in terms of the impact of technology and IVD on hard outcomes like survival and quality of life is lacking and needs to be generated. Resources – human, infrastructure, and fiscal – may be a challenge, especially qualitatively, if not quantitatively. The market is still not regulated and the heterogeneity as well as the fragmentation has in its wake, a potential for both overt and covert misuse and exploitation. Direct-to-customer marketing with bundled and packaged investigations by companies of dubious interests, inadequate technological prowess, scientific know-how, and infrastructural resources is indeed a heady-mix with far-reaching consequences for the health of the society, both physical and mental. Even the intellectual maturity of the bourgeoise class of the country may be found wanting in evaluating and assessing the adoption of these technologies, and will remain vulnerable to exploitation by the fly-by-night companies, with sinister intent and conflicts of interest.

Used in the right earnest, MedTech and IVD industry can help create a resilient, equitable, accessible, and affordable healthcare system for the country. In the same breath, digital wellbeing, virtual care, remote monitoring are new offerings being dished out without adequate knowledge backup of the subset of the population that they would be subserving, and are yet being offered on a mass scale, through a campaign of hysteria and health phobia, rather than need-based.

Though I endorse technology adoption in medicine, the advisory may go amiss if not upended with a caveat – the technology should play secondary to the healing powers of the human touch, compassion, and empathy. We shall rue the day when the healing of holistic medicine plays a second fiddle and loses out to the technology-driven, mechanistic cure of illnesses. Therefore, the biggest challenge going forward will be getting the right balance between the two.

The jury is out on this… and I leave it as a food for thought for all of you.