Published August 1, 2022 | 3 min read
This article was originally published on BioWorld MedTech
Even as new waves of COVID-19 cause less direct disruption in the delivery of health care, the ongoing pandemic leaves a dramatically altered landscape for medical devices in its wake.
The RBC Global Healthcare Conference revealed trends that will continue to reshape the utilization of medical technology and delivery of health care, while industry leaders drilled down into the details in a focused panel discussion. All agreed: the pandemic catapulted telemedicine and remote monitoring ahead five or more years, a hybrid delivery system with greater fluctuations in volume will emerge, devices that facilitate the movement of care out of the hospital to home or outpatient settings will remain in high demand and patient-centered control of health care will continue to attract additional industries into health care markets.
“Our experts on the panel agreed that we’re probably five to 10 or 15 years ahead as we overcame barriers that we may not have spent money on otherwise,” RBC Capital Markets LLC Analyst Shagun Singh told BioWorld. “COVID really catalyzed the trend forward in telehealth, virtual health, remote surgery and health.”
“Remote patient monitoring has taken off in a big way on the cardiology side and we are seeing it now on the orthopedic side.”
Shagun Singh, Medical Devices Analyst, RBC Capital Markets
The use cases for telemedicine continue to expand, with particular potential in consumer-driven primary care, behavioral health and home health, the panel observed. Challenges remain, most notably in expansion of broadband service to rural and low-income areas and staffing. Reimbursement issues dominated the discussion of telemedicine prior to the pandemic, but that has shifted.
“While continued improvements in the reimbursement landscape and ongoing shift to value-based care could hasten uptake, it is really only the easier-to-address logistical issues (like better integrating into workflows) that remain the primary friction,” noted the RBC Health Care Equity team in a report on the panel.
Medical device manufacturers also see increasing opportunities in remote patient monitoring after surgery.
“Remote patient monitoring has taken off in a big way on the cardiology side and we are seeing it now on the orthopedic side,” Singh said. “Persona IQ is the world’s first talking knee, if you will. It has a sensor at the end of the implant, and the great thing is that it leads to 100% compliance because the sensor is in the implant and the implant is in your body, and you can essentially monitor the patient for up to 20 years.”
“Hospitals are positioning themselves to follow the patient’s journey outside of the hospital into those alternative care sites so that they can capture that revenue stream.”
Shagun Singh, Medical Devices Analyst, RBC Capital Markets
The integrated monitoring combined with artificial intelligence (AI) in Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc.’s smart knee allows the physician to call in a patient and tweak a component of the implant before the issue progresses and a revision surgery is needed.
AI is being used across the board to improve outcomes and reduce costs with surgical robotics, infection prediction, neurostimulation, dialysis and diabetes. At the same time, AI is facilitating the shift to lower acuity settings, whether ambulatory surgical centers, doctors’ offices or in the home.
“Hospitals are positioning themselves to follow the patient’s journey outside of the hospital into those alternative care sites so that they can capture that revenue stream,” Singh added.
The shifting location of health care utilization has created an opportunity for any device or technology such as wearables, digital therapeutics and monitoring devices that facilitate movement of care to a less costly setting to scale up.
Employers are on the same bandwagon and looking not just to shift care to less expensive settings but to also prevent the need for some procedures by providing wearables and encouraging other interventions in the workplace.
“Our panelists hypothesized that over the next 10+ years, many companies – including ones not thought of as health care companies – will converge into health care, with a reframed view that every participant in the U.S. economy is part of the health care industry, and that companies will need to improve the health of their talent base,” the Health Care Equity team noted.
That could lead industries that rely on manual labor to provide employees a free Fitbit to manage issues early; others may offer digital therapeutics to treat or prevent common conditions.
While the long term looks promising for medical device manufacturers, in the short term, providers and device companies will likely have to build in greater flexibility to account for continuing COVID waves. In a recent survey of 200 physicians, RBC learned that doctors were seeing 7% more patients per month today than they had been, and they expected patient volumes to increase another 17% over the next two years, as patients returned this spring for procedures that must be done in person. That could change in an instant depending on the course of the pandemic.
“Our panelists described ‘secondary waves’ where patients may choose to delay elective procedures during a COVID wave,” the team noted, “and then a hospital may experience a wave (followed by a dip) in cardiac procedures, and this unevenness in volumes persists and makes financial and resource planning difficult.”
