As 2024 ends, healthcare faces significant challenges, including rising costs, reimbursement complexities, regulatory hurdles, and integrating AI into existing systems. However, the year has also highlighted exciting opportunities, particularly in AI, innovation, data-driven care, and personalisation, all of which are reshaping the industry.
Towards the Digital Health programmes at 4YFN25, ECHAlliance provides an account of key insights from 2024 and the trends to watch in Healthcare innovation in the next 12 months.
Key Insights from 2024
The biggest challenges healthcare systems globally faced in 2024 were related to reimbursement, rising costs, regulatory pressures and the introduction of AI innovations. The latter also represented an enormous opportunity for the healthcare sector in the passing year, alongside other opportunities, including those represented by a growing ageing population, data and data legislation changes, and the personalisation of healthcare services.
To overcome these challenges and leverage on the opportunities, healthcare businesses must remain agile to keep pace with healthcare's rapid evolution. Customer expectations demand clear evidence of quality, yet many organisations struggle with marketing their services effectively. Looking ahead, engaging directly with consumers and patients will be crucial for success.
Trends to Watch in 2025
Access to health data & AI
This continues to a very hot topic as generative AI has made huge development strides, and access to health data is needed to train AI and develop a range of AI solutions for both back-office and clinical application.
With the AI Act in the European Union expected to be formally published early in 2025, and then ECHAlliance expects to quickly see the implementation of a secondary legislation from the European Commission and Member States. Health Parliament, ECHAlliance’s Indian Partner, is promoting “Data First AI later”: a drive to improve the quality of health data so that AI is trained on high quality and not, for example, on biased data. This is not just a trend for software developers, technology, MedTech and Pharma businesses to watch in 2025, but rather for next 3 years at least.
Africa & India
The African and Indian markets are going to continue to be trendsetters in digital health for various reasons. Firstly, the sheer scale of health services required is going to lead to incredible learning about efficient scaled delivery. Secondly, the frugal innovation is going to lead to many products and services that will be transferred to older traditional markets. Thirdly, these markets have limited infrastructure and so they are expected to be faster adopters of digital health products and services enabled by innovations in mobile,5G, 6G Satellite and other telecommunications advances. In 2025 ECHAlliance will hold flagship events in both Africa and India (see here).
Women’s Health
Gaining momentum globally, women’s health remains a critical focus, with initiatives addressing menopause, equity, and tailored solutions. FemTech, in particular, is evolving and expanding, with startups and established companies investing in research and development to meet the unique healthcare needs of women.
In September, ECHAlliance organised a Global Health Connector event focused on Women’s Health at the United Nations Science Summit in New York. The event saw announcements from authorities in both the US and the UK regarding work on Menopause (more here).
Convergence of industries around healthcare
Eleven years ago, ECHAlliance launched the first Digital Health & Summit at MWC, and it is now part of 4YFN. The idea was to join the dots between healthcare and telecommunications. Over the years it has been exciting to see the dots expand to include software, technology, pharma, MedTech and Life Sciences. Digital health has become the space where all these industries are converging and will continue to converge in 2025 as new collaborations are formed across the sectors and across the globe.
With these insights, ECHAlliance continues to champion innovation and collaboration, setting the stage for a transformative 2025. It invites you to delve further into the above by attending the Digital Health and Wellness Summit, at 4YFN25.
ECHAlliance is the co-organiser of the digital health programme at 4YFN25. Read more about ECHAlliance here.