Level of AI integration and its Impact on Customer Adoption in Healthcare
Overview:
AI's rapid expansion reaches numerous sectors, with healthcare standing out prominently. Healthcare AI integrates diverse medical technologies to optimize medical procedures and enhances the scale and volume of patient care. This industry reaches a variety of sectors including insurance, equipment, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and managed healthcare. Each sector benefits from decision support, remote customer monitoring, online self-service, predictive analysis, administrative efficiency, national language processing, and revolutionary drug discovery methods. These transformative technologies have accelerated the medical AI field's growth and efficiency. This new industry has surpassed expectations, benefiting individuals, corporations, and society at large. Ongoing research and innovation by countless companies continue to revolutionize artificial intelligence in the rapidly growing healthcare AI industry. Many companies involved in this industry use AI to help improve efficiency of patient outreach. Examples vary from a range of mobile personalized data, digital registries, AI diagnostic technology, DGT, and more. The common solution many companies share is providing better patient care, data, and outreach by using AI in clinical research or through clinical data. “Healthcare AI companies have raised $2.6 billion across 192 deals in 2023. Even with the slowdown in overall funding, deal size has dipped by just 3 percent compared to 2022. There are currently more than 1,500 healthcare AI vendors, over half of them founded in the past seven years.”(1)
Sectors:
There are many sectors that make up the healthcare industry as healthcare reaches a large audience. Each sector greatly contributes to the growth and the success of the healthcare industry. In regards to medical AI, there are a few important sectors that should be looked at when building your start-up. Click this link to learn more about each sector and its contributions to the healthcare industry and how AI could impact it.
Customer Adoption & Its Importance:
Customer adoption in the healthcare AI industry incentivizes companies to grow in volume, see better margins, to stay relevant amongst competitors, and most importantly to generate revenue for the company. Approaches to growing your audience vary significantly depending on the sector of the industry your startup falls into. Understanding and effectively targeting your specific audience is key to success in this industry. Consumers fall into a variety of categories here including patients, providers, payers, pharmacists, doctors, researchers, hospitals, and etc. For example, a virtual care company’s target audience could be directly acquiring a patient versus a drug discovery company whose focus is to target a pharma company. The virtual care company’s marketing strategies may involve marketing & developing user-friendly interfaces, offering convenient appointment scheduling for patients throughout the world, and providing comprehensive virtual care services accessible to those everywhere. On the other hand, the drug discovery company, targeting pharmaceutical companies, would focus on showcasing how their technology can enhance the efficiency of clinical trials, improve the drug discovery processes, and optimize supply chain management for pharmaceutical companies. In the case of the virtual care company, their marketing strategies would revolve around reaching and engaging patients directly while the drug discovery company's approach would be centered around demonstrating the value of their technology to pharmaceutical companies.
Marketing has become easier and easier over the years as technology and online marketing have become more and more popular, so it is much easier to reach a wide market. As the example above showcases, it is not beneficial to copy another company’s marketing strategies as they may not be specific to each individual startup. With the use of today’s resources, finding your company’s niche in this industry has become a lot easier. It is now less costly to market a company since many successful marketing strategies take place on the internet. Today, customers do deep dives on each medical company they find on the internet, scouring websites, analyzing patient testimonials. Consumers look for what offices do differently than competitors, each practices’ skills, the customer service, and even on social media to get a good look at all aspects of the company. Even with a good online presence, it is necessary that the office has the same personality it does online so the consumer feels comfortable starting business. (9) Medical offices need to stand out in today’s market to acquire and retain customers, because without customers there will be no revenue, which is bad for business. It is important to focus on the customer type your startup is targeted towards. For example, consumer healthcare businesses that target patients directly are most successful when they have a great UX (the experiences people have with healthcare technology and services), quality doctors, and accessible lab testing. Another example is medical insurance companies grow when they focus on factors such as partnership, protection, and personalization as their target market are people who need someone to trust with personal information. Additionally, businesses that focus on creating new technologies should focus on having real time data, strong research, and leveraging business operations for possible customers to become successful as they can possibly be. There are a variety of different sectors in this industry, leading to numerous business models. To allow your startup to gain the optimal growth it deserves, you should analyze the differences between business models in the industry and figure out what marketing strategies, company aspects, and factors would be best to allow for your company’s success.
Market Map
For aspiring entrepreneurs to better understand this landscape, I have created a market map for a general overview of the industy’s landscape. This field overview will allow for a quick glance at the industry and provide information such as the fastest growing sectors, where AI is/is not working, and common themes seen in the medical AI field.
Please explore this link to view the Market Map and Analysis.
Conclusion:
Overall, the Healthcare AI industry reaches a broad market at an extremely quick rate, making it one of the fastest growing industries in today’s market. The industry has many more components than one would think including equipment manufacturing, insurance, drugs, administrative work, and the most common which is managed health care (hospitals, offices, etc.). Each sector requires a large number of factors to succeed. Although there are numerous key aspects, the most important area in this industry’s market is National Language Processing (NLP) Technology. Not only are many startups becoming solely focused on this technology right here, NLP dominates almost all AI related companies in some sort of way. NLP reaches all sectors within the industry, has been receiving the most amount of funding, and makes customer interaction simple resulting in a large amount of consumer adoption.Natural Language Processing (NLP) is growing very quickly and reaching a wide audience. This field includes many parts, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, computational linguistics, and machine learning. The development of LLMs has made NLP tools more accessible to both startups and big companies. Startups can now use these advanced tools to create new products and services without needing a lot of resources or expertise. This has led to a surge in innovation, allowing smaller companies to compete with larger ones. Big companies also benefit greatly from NLP advancements. They can use these tools to improve customer service with chatbots, generate content, and analyze data more efficiently. Integrating NLP into their operations makes their work smoother and provides a more personalized and effective experience for users. This helps companies grow and stay competitive in their markets. In short, the rapid growth of NLP, driven by the development of LLMs, computational linguistics, and machine learning, is changing how businesses use technology. By making these advanced tools more available, companies of all sizes can innovate and grow, transforming our interactions with digital technologies. Companies that are becoming solely focused on NLP and creating products have been growing at faster rates than companies in drug discovery, as they only have a limited target audience. NLP allows physicians to ask for help in scheduling, it can communicate with an insurance customer to discuss insurance plans, but overall it decreases the costs and increases efficiency and speed which allow for a rapid growth rate for companies. In 2022, the global natural language processing market size was valued to be at $27.73 billion, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.4% from 2023 to 2030(20). On the other hand, the drug discovery global market size is valued at $18.14 billion with a CAGR of 8.5% from 2023 to 2032(21),and the biotechnology market is set to grow at a CAGR of 14% between 2023 and 2032 (22). NLP outshines the many other sectors within the industry at a faster rate, proving that NLP is growing quickly across all markets, including healthcare. While AI is said to be the future of healthcare and the world, there are numerous overlooked challenges that accompany AI’s integration into the medical industry. AI has changed the face of the medical field including medical imaging, data quality, privacy, labs, diagnoses, and much more. Along with these challenges come ethical and legal challenges as well. One prominent issue is the gap increase in quality of healthcare amongst communities. Societies, such as low-income and developing countries will not have the access to such advanced technologies. Som while the healthcare in developed societies will become more technology oriented, the healthcare industry in developing societies will be stuck in the past leading to a decrease in the quality of their healthcare since the technological change will shift the world’s focus towards a more modernized approach in healthcare. Other challenges include lack of privacy as most patient files will be AI controlled, which can easily be hacked, unlikely that patients will accept a machine to human interaction for medical consultations, issues with patient rights and informed consent, and much more(23) . Additionally, a key factor in from human to technological transition in the medical field is trust. Trust, regardless of what kind of medical problem is occuring, is a key role that patients, clinicians, and doctors alike heavily believe in. A big part of AI is its role in healthcare and people’s concern about AI not fully understanding data analysis, leading to further complications in the future. Although trust and human-machine interaction is one of the highest facing problems, many are finding ways to adapt and overcome this issue as AI is becoming more involved in the medical field. With these challenges posing a threat to the development of the Medical AI field, these issues hinder the growth of the medical AI market around the world. There are ways to overcome these challenges that are yet to be discovered, but once solutions are found, the implementation of AI will change the medical world for the better and allow people, like you, to turn their dream into a reality solving solutions for medical problems worldwide.
*Worked with industry stakeholders including the SeedtoB team while conducting research for this project.*
