Rock Health COO Megan Zweig in a recent MedCityNews interview.

Digital Health

Digital Health Trends to Watch in 2022

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first Digital Health Wire of 2022. The past year was anything but boring for those working in digital health, with the pandemic continuing to expose the strengths and weaknesses of our healthcare system.

As with any new year, 2022 brings its own set of challenges for digital health companies to address, and a new roundup of the trends connecting them together.

• Data Dominance – EHRs, wearables, and telehealth solutions are among the long list of technologies ushering in a new era of healthcare data collection, and leveraging this data to improve outcomes will be a centerpiece of digital health strategies in 2022 and beyond. As more data is able to be collected, more impactful insights will be able to be distilled, and Oracle’s recent acquisition of Cerner is likely a sign of more action to come in the pursuit of patient data.

• Hospital at Home – Over the past year, the remote care space has gained a lot of momentum, with organizations like Moving Health Home beginning to advocate for policies that enable home-based clinical care. At the same time, remote care providers like DispatchHealth and Current Health have seen a surge in utilization, which will help to generate data demonstrating the effectiveness of home-care models and could accelerate regulatory support.

• Less Tuck-In Acquisitions – Last year saw record digital health M&A activity by nearly every metric, but the rising valuations of private startups could start to have a negative impact on the total number of acquisitions. Tuck-in acquisitions, where larger businesses acquire companies for their talent or technology, might begin to see a slowdown if younger startups continue to command higher multiples earlier in their life cycles.

• More Mergers – Although it’s possible that investor enthusiasm is making smaller companies less attractive as acquisition targets, it is also creating a landscape of well-funded startups that will be looking at consolidation as a way to combine strengths, such as with the recent merger of Ginger and Headspace.

• Behavioral Health Spotlight – Behavioral health is among the fastest growing segments of digital health, with a stress-inducing pandemic simultaneously lowering the stigma surrounding mental illness while increasing mental health literacy. These circumstances have created a large disconnect between the supply of mental health providers and the demand from patients, and the companies tackling this problem will continue to attract a lot of attention from consumers and investors alike.

It’s hard to say which, if any, of these trends will be the top story of the next 12 months, but it seems likely that we’re heading into another year with more innovation than can fit into a five-bullet roundup. Wishing you the best in 2022, Digital Health Wire readers!

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• Volumes Up, Multiples Down: PwC released a report showing that health services M&A activity was up 56% in 2021, driven in part by 407 physician medical group acquisitions (up from 185 in 2020). The findings also include figures that could be interpreted as early indicators of a slowdown in M&A demand, such as declining exit multiples in four of the seven tracked subsectors.

• Rheumatology Telehealth: A study out of the University of Cambridge surveyed 1,340 patients and 111 clinicians about the effectiveness of telemedicine for rheumatology, finding that 86% of patients and 93% clinicians felt that telediagnosis was less accurate than face-to-face assessments. Misdiagnoses were frequently attributed to the absence of in-person examinations that are critical for initial rheumatological diagnosis due to clinicians’ reliance on non-verbal cues to gauge pain levels and the mental state of patients.

• The Nocebo Effect: A recent Bloomberg article warns of the “nocebo effect” from smartwatch notifications for stress and fatigue. The nocebo effect shows that perceptions of distress can increase when the sensation is highlighted, such as when someone believes they’ve had a good night sleep, then receives a poor sleep score from a wearable and feels more tired after the fact.

• In-Home Diagnostic Support: Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, published a viewpoint in JAMA in support of in-home diagnostic testing, outlining how the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of rapid assessments tests that will be “increasingly coupled with telemedicine visits” for a range of pathogens. Gottlieb predicts that the FDA will be highly supportive of in-home testing moving forward, which is good news for entrepreneurs solving problems in this space.

• EU Approves Microsoft + Nuance: The European Commission unconditionally approved Microsoft’s pending acquisition Nuance Communications, clearing the last major hurdle for the acquisition that is now expected to be finalized in the coming weeks. The investigation found that Nuance’s transcription software for end-users differs significantly from Microsoft’s speech recognition APIs targeted at developers, and that combining the two will not stifle competition.

• Telepsychology Preferences: New research published in Telemedicine and e-Health found that 257 patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures that were enrolled in a 12-week counseling program were three times more likely to choose a telepsychology visit than an in-office session when given a choice between the two. Telepsychology visits were also significantly less likely to be cancelled (OR=0.43), highlighting the barriers that impede seizure patients’ ability to attend treatment such as lack of mobility or nearby specialists.

• Data Guidelines: The FDA published draft guidance on using digital health technologies (DHTs) to acquire data remotely from clinical investigation participants. The guidance includes specialized direction for both hardware and software to safely gather health information from study participants to accelerate medical product development.

• Biogen Acquisition Rumors: The Korea Economic Daily reported that Samsung is in talks to acquire pharmaceutical giant Biogen for $42B, which would be the largest overseas acquisition ever by a South Korean company. Samsung recently stated that it would invest $206B into biopharmaceuticals, AI, and healthcare over the next three years, although the company quickly denied the acquisition report.

• Mindfulness Training Study: A new study published in JMIR tested the efficacy of app-delivered mindfulness training (MT) on patients with generalized anxiety disorder, finding that the MT group (n=32) demonstrated a significant reduction in anxiety compared with the control group (n=33) (median change in GAD-7 questionnaire at two months: -8.5 vs -1.0). The MT modules targeted maladaptive reinforcement learning by helping individuals simply observe repetitive cycles of worry rather than habitually react and reinforce them.

• PandemicX Accelerator: Fifteen digital health startups are joining the PandemicX Accelerator program sponsored by the HHS to address health inequities exacerbated by the pandemic. The companies will use publicly accessible data to develop interoperable tools targeting areas such as national public health, socioeconomic outcome indicators, and community resilience.