Phi Trends: How Covid-19 Has Accelerated Healthtech

The crisis has opened up many growth avenues for healthtech ventures, which are attracting a significant amount of investor interest, opines entrepreneur and investor Shailesh Dash, who shares his market perspective in this monthly column

- Shailesh Dash

The Covid-19 pandemic is changing the way the healthcare industry functions, especially its standard operating procedures and the services it offers. Most notably, Covid-19 is reshaping healthcare through technology (healthtech), which is increasingly becoming an integral part of the care delivery model. The outbreak has not only presented a new opportunity for innovators to create faster, smarter, and more accurate predictive healthcare tools for diagnosis and treatment, but has also amplified the necessity for healthcare organisations to scale and adjust to the new reality. Recent developments in the arenas of telehealth, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), virtual consultations, robotics and big data/data tracking are helping tackle the Covid-19 outbreak and flatten the infection curve. Not just doctors, clinicians and researchers, but even governments across the globe are increasingly turning to new-age technologies for R&D, to deliver services and cater to a rapidly growing pool of patients.