- Search term must have more than 2 characters.
Learn more about EIT Digital Health White Paper April 2022.
04. 05. 2022
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us the serious consequences that healthcare systems can have not only on health, but also on economic growth and social cohesion. The pandemic has also accelerated investment in the health sector. According to the Crunchbase database, European start-ups have reached €52.5 billion in venture funding in the first half of 2021, up from €16.5 billion in the first half of 2020 and €21.8 billion in the second half of 2020. As Europe's leading healthcare innovation community, EIT Health has been called upon to combat the Covid-19 pandemic and has been at the forefront of some of the most significant innovative healthcare solutions introduced in the last two years.
The Covid-19 pandemic has had both short- and long-term impacts on the development of digital health globally and in emerging European regions. Through surveys and in-depth interviews, five key areas have been identified that appear to be crucial for the future development of digital health.
- Awareness of science - Respondents say the rate of discovery in the past year has been more than remarkable. Scientists have been able to get to the bottom of the Covid-19 pandemic and invent tests and vaccines. This has given the public a chance to see what scientists are capable of and how science is helping humanity.
- Regulating digital health - The pandemic has led to the use of more digital health tools across Europe
- Health data security - One of the main challenges during the pandemic was interoperability and data quality. According to respondents, this would help to diagnose faster and reorient healthcare systems towards more home-based care. One of the "side effects" of the pandemic, in their view, was to accelerate work on the European Health Data System to GDPR.
- Fast track to digital solutions - Many people have realised that digital health technologies need to be implemented quickly and have been able to come up with creative solutions under pressure. Change has proven to be possible and effective.
- Collaboration at regional level - As highlighted by respondents, collaboration between governments, scientists, businesses, startups, scale-ups and citizens was essential to increase efficiency, speed up innovation processes in healthcare and reduce costs.
Now let's look at the specific results of the research. On average, respondents believe that the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated the pace of digitalisation in healthcare, with an average score of 7 out of 10.
When asked what types of digital health solutions have been implemented in each country, 279 respondents answered. Almost two-thirds (66.3%) of respondents said that virtual care and telemedicine solutions have been implemented in their country.
A total of 1,030 respondents answered the question on factors that can contribute to faster development of digital health in each country. Overall, respondents believe that the development of digital health can be most influenced by the education and upskilling of healthcare professionals.
Respondents from the following professional segments participated in the research:
Based on the data, EIT Health proposes the following recommendations.
1. funding digital skills training on data analytics, artificial intelligence and putting real data standards into practice.
2. wider adoption of digital health solutions in sparsely populated regions and hospitals to reduce health inequalities and costs associated with ageing populations and post-method debt,
3. EU Member States need to put in place socially responsible and credible legislative initiatives to support the development of digital health solutions.
4. The development of disruptive digital health solutions requires access to historical and real-world data that will provide a testbed for ML, DL and AI, technologies.
You can read the full research report here: DIGITAL HEALTH - Trends and desirable progress in the emerging regions