Sagentia collaborated with a global medical device company to build a framework exploring the digital health landscape, looking beyond the hype and attempting to define current, successful real-world applications of digital technology throughout the care pathway. This framework was then used to identify potential growth areas for the client in the digital health space.

The digital health landscape is highly diverse and evolving rapidly, making it extremely difficult to create a clear impression of the technologies and applications involved. Most existing taxonomies tend to focus on the latest and most prominent applications, for example, personalized medicine based on “big data” genomics, or lifestyle applications built around wearables such as activity monitors. The key problem with these taxonomies is that they only describe the status quo and are not capable of evolving to accurately map how the landscape is changing.

Our approach was a little different. We wanted to identify a disease-agnostic framework, which captured the key technologies that were being used and the broad types of applications that they enable. It was hoped that this framework could then be overlaid on existing care pathways, to help spot potential new opportunities for disruption.

We found that every digital health solution today requires at least one of 5 basic technology building blocks, or clusters, as summarized in the figure below:

The digital health landscape infographic we created from this shows how the relative importance of each technology cluster changes as we move through different applications within the care pathway – through prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.

Click here to explore the infographic.