The Growth Of The UK's Digital Healthcare Market

When we published our report on Connected Health earlier this year we focussed predominately on how technology could improve peoples' access and ability to self-manage, develop better communication and understanding between patients and healthcare professionals and help health and social care providers deliver safer, more efficient and cost-effective care. One issue we found difficult to quantify was the current size of the digital health market in the UK. In September, our colleagues in Monitor Deloitte sought to tackle this issue and, on the basis of work commissioned by the Office of Life Sciences, published a report on the industry challenges and dynamics in the UK. This week's blog highlights some of the key findings in this report and why the UK is well positioned to take advantage of the digital health opportunity.

The report, Digital Health in the UK: An industry study for the Office of Life Sciences acknowledges that digital health innovations are necessary for the future of efficient healthcare service delivery. Specifically, if the identified market challenges can be resolved, over time, then digital health advances have the potential to help increase access, decrease healthcare system costs and improve health outcomes. The report focuses on the UK in the context of the global market, drawing on examples from other countries to identify the challenges to growth, barriers to adoption, shifting dynamics and how the emergent industry is developing.

Overall, the report considers the UK to be well positioned in many elements of digital health with the potential to grow into a global leader. It examines four inter-related sub-sectors: telehealthcare (telecare and telehealth); mHealth; health analytics; and digital health systems (the primary care and hospital information systems used to collect data that is used for health analytics). Though these sub-sectors currently have different levels of maturity, rates of growth and market penetration the line between them is becoming increasingly blurred.

Telecare, which provides care and support at a distance based on fixed line, analogue technology, is a mature market in the UK with a strong UK heritage and the highest penetration per capita in the over 65s category of any global market. The strength of the UK market and global position is in part due to the UK being an early adopter, supported by a large local government programmes for telecare. However, the market is well established and...