While healthcare continues to embrace digital transformation, not all digital health solutions have done as well as the COVID response app, for instance.
The wide market of digital health apps faces funding challenges, which may be unsurprising from a new study by GlobalData given the tight purse strings across the whole public sector.
Moreover, patients are controlling the ever-evolving demand in terms of how digital services should enable efficient access to entitled healthcare benefits.
The study overviews the cost and other important factors in healthcare in data protection, privacy, and secure and quick access to health services.
As a result, the study eludes to the real risk of some health apps, that serve an honourable purpose, failing to keep financially afloat.
Elia Garcia, Medical Analyst at GlobalData, gave a clear picture of the significant funding requirements across the public sector that compounds the challenges of solutions especially in the overused and underfunded healthcare sector.
She comments: “In order to develop and maintain healthcare apps, significant funding must be allocated to software development, quality assurance, legal compliance, and ongoing improvements. If app maintenance costs get too high or development costs exceed expected revenue, the company’s financial survival may be in jeopardy.”
For months, Babylon Holdings Limited, a UK-based digital healthcare startup, has been seeking funding for its operations and to boost its business to market.
Subsidiaries of the America startup recently applied to have bankruptcy protection on behalf of the company.
The company has backed down from a recently announced partnership between AlbaCore and MindMaze to merge business functions.
Garcia concludes: “Digital healthcare organisations were urged to reach their maximum size to dominate the market, but now that financing rates are rising, they are struggling, and medtech companies are not interested to acquire them. That is the case of Pear Therapeutics, that following bankruptcy, its assets were sold for $6 million”.
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