The online health trends pharma should be tapping into

Each year digital folk all over the world look to the Internet Trends report, delivered by Bond Capital founder Mary Meeker, for a summary of the most important emerging online technologies and consumer behaviours.    The 2019 report underlines the strength of some trends familiar to pharma and points to some unsettling implications for the industry if it cannot respond appropriately. Along with some general online trends - the growing consumption of images and video, the rise of the podcast and the ongoing spread of Amazon Echo - the report highlights some important consumer healthcare trends.  Perhaps the chief highlight for pharma is the ongoing rise of wearables, whose use has doubled in four years in the US. And rapid growth in their adoption shows no sign of stopping. Gartner ’s latest forecast is that the wearables market will grow 27% in 2020 to $52 billion.  Google ’s $2.1 billion October acquisition of Fitbit, in a bid to get more deeply involved in the healthcare sector, is yet another sign of the growing importance of wearables to pharma. Google has already been dabbling here for a while - Fitbit was already using Google’s Healthcare API to connect its wearable devices to electronic medical records with the ultimate aim of enabling doctors to get health data straight from their patients’ wrists. Wearables and Real Time Data The ongoing rise of wearables is a trend that pharma needs to take very seriously indeed. They are probably central for the f...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news