1. Outline

Digital healthcare can be defined as an industrial area that combines the healthcare industry with ICT technology (IoT(Internet of Things)), cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The use of big data in the digital healthcare industry is considered the most important technology for the development and utilization of the industry, and Stadista(research institution) estimates that the big data market related to digital healthcare will more than five times increase from $11.5 billion in 2016 to $68.8 billion in 2025. It was estimated that it would be used in various areas such as treatment and tracking of high-risk patients and personal health care.

▶The expected effect of introducing big data in the digital healthcare field

① Healthcare services using effective patient health tracking big data facilitate patients themselves and medical institutions to track their health status so far. Individuals can prevent diseases in advance by checking their conditions, and medical institutions can quickly cope with emergencies because it is simple to identify the medical status of high-risk patients.

② Using big data with reduced misdiagnosis rates, patients can access prescribed drugs or medical history easily. Therefore, medical staff can reduce the mistake of prescribing wrong drugs or drugs that do not fit the patient.

③ The budget loss of cost-saving medical institutions is usually caused by exceeding labor costs according to the number of reservations. Using big data, medical institutions can reduce costs by deploying medical staff by predicting the patient’s visit or hospitalization rate.

2. Trends in the mobile healthcare industry

▶The mobile healthcare market is expected to grow 59% annually by 2025.

Statista predicts that the mobile healthcare market will continue to grow, and it is the largest investment in the healthcare market from 2017, with an average annual growth rate of 59% by 2025, growing to $332.7 billion.

• The most used application is fitness-related application

The fitness-related application market was $1.937 billion in 2019, and is expected to grow nearly 10 times to $1.8 billion by 2025. The fitness-related terminal market is also expected to grow from $77.85 million in 2019 to $15 million in 2022.

• The expected effect of increasing the rate of introduction of telemedicine and reducing operating costs

The size of the telemedicine market is expected to reach $30.5 billion in 2019, and is expected to grow to $41.2 billion by 2021. According to a 2017 survey of U.S. hospital officials by U.S. law firm Foley & Lardner, 76% of respondents reportedly introduced telemedicine service or plan to introduce it in the future. The introduction of telemedicine significantly lowers the patient’s medical cost and operating cost of medical institutions, which is the biggest growth engine.

According to a survey by U.S. medical service company Humana, the average cost per telemedicine in the U.S. is $38, significantly lower than the average cost per face-to-face medical treatment of $114. In addition, in a survey of institutions that introduced telemedicine, more than 70% said they experienced cost savings, of which 29% said they were able to reduce costs by more than 20%.

• VR/AR technology are expected to lead the development of telemedicine

VR and AR technologies are expected to be actively introduced in telemedicine. Statista predicts that the size of the digital healthcare market where VR and AR were introduced will increase from $1.08 billion in 2018 to $11.14 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, in the healthcare field, VR and AR technologies can be used not only for telemedicine but also for medical staff training and hospital management.

<출처: 품목별 보고서-헬스케어-, 2019>