Preventive Healthcare: Being Prepared
Preventive healthcare technologies and services include measures to reduce the risk of playing host to several fatal diseases. The measures comprise assessment of risk factors to determine the chances of contracting common as well as rare diseases, detection of diseases in their early stages, monitoring treatment progress, and improving the efficiency of healthcare services with reduced errors.
Preventive healthcare methods are applied prior to the appearance of symptoms, unlike in the treatment market where treatment is administered after the occurrence of symptoms. Preventive healthcare measures have the potential to significantly reduce the yearly mortality rate due to preventable diseases. 9 out of top 10 causes of deaths related to diseases and disorders in the world are considered manageable with the efficient use of these methods.
Advancements in healthcare technologies and growing awareness regarding the preventable methods are expected to play an important role in improving the quality of lives. Preventive healthcare is all about spending less and staying fit as opposed to spending a fortune on treatments upon disease diagnosis. A brief explanation for the types of preventive measures is given below.
Prophylactic Measures
Vaccines provide the immunity to fight against probable infections. Fatal diseases such as polio, rabies, tuberculosis, measles, and smallpox have been wiped out with vaccines. These vaccines are still being used as a prophylactic measure to avoid the recurrence of these diseases. Apart from infectious diseases, vaccines are under development for varied conditions such as cancers, allergy, and autism. Ongoing studies focused toward the development of vaccines for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease present profitable growth opportunities for this market.
Early Disease Detection Techniques
Most of the diseases, such as cancer, are avoidable if detected in the early phase. Advanced techniques such as gene sequencing are capable of assessing the chances of disease occurrence well in advance. However, in the developing economies, the market penetration of these techniques is slow owing to the high cost and lack of laboratories equipped with advanced instruments. The availability of regular screening methods for probable diseases such as breast cancers and leukemia is comparatively higher than the availability of personalized diagnostic techniques for these diseases. However, these screening methods are disease specific and are capable of diagnosing a limited number of diseases.
Chronic Disease Management Technologies
Monitoring of treatment progress is equivalently crucial in yielding favorable treatment outcomes. These methods enable physicians to assess the treatment response and devise further treatment regimes.
Current trends in these technologies include the introduction of over the counter products that can be conveniently used by patients. Integration of such devices with smartphones and cloud technologies is accentuating the convenience of using these devices and consequently, their popularity.
Advanced Technologies to Reduce Errors
Medical errors cause a significant number of hospital deaths globally. Reduction in these errors is directly proportional to minimizing the death toll in hospitals. Medical errors can be limited through automated systems such as electronic health record management technologies, which are capable of determining prescription errors, and smart infusion pumps that auto-adjust the dose according to patient response.
Automation of hospital pharmacies, organ labeling systems, and clinical decision support systems are being adopted by many hospitals in the developing regions due to the commercial availability of the advanced versions of these technologies at competitive prices. Incorporation of systems to reduce medical errors is rapidly increasing in the emerging countries of Latin America and Asia Pacific. The large patient pool is attributable to the presence of a large geriatric population and booming medical tourism industry in these regions, which in turn is propelling the demand for healthcare services. The enlarging patient pool, as a result, is encouraging healthcare authorities to adopt automated management systems in healthcare settings to contain medical errors.
Competitive Outlook
The global preventive healthcare technologies and services market is innovation led. Thus, market leaders are competing head-to-head with each other to expand their market share through wide product offerings. Companies are focusing on the R&D of innovative techniques that would prove to be profitable to the preventive technologies market.
Few of the key players operating in the market include but are not limited to Merck & Co., Inc, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Pfizer, Inc., McKesson Corporation, Omnicell, Inc., Medtronic, Alere, Inc., and Healthways, Inc.
In-depth report on global preventive healthcare technologies and services market by Grand View Research: