Research & consulting firm Frost & Sullivan forecasts that 2020 will be an unforgiving but transformational year for the healthcare industry.

The firm’s recent study, titled “Post-Pandemic Global Healthcare Market Outlook 2020”, shows that the sector is expected to witness a 0.6 percent drop in growth this year as the world grapples with COVID-19.

Before the pandemic, the original growth rate for 2020 was forecast to be 5.3 percent.

"While the short-term demand for testing and the race to find a vaccine intensifies, governments are reallocating budgets to finance healthcare services and assessing the feasibility of immunity passports, mass vaccinations, and scaling up of contact tracing,” Unmesh Lal, Transformational Health Program Manager at Frost & Sullivan said.

Key predictions by Frost & Sullivan for the sector post COVID-19 include:

- Virtual consultations by healthcare professionals will become the mainstream care delivery model

- Informatics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions addressing workflow automation and operational analytics will witness 100 percent growth this year.

- Alternate testing sites like pharmacies will become permanent ecosystem participants.

- Thirty-three percent of clinical trials worldwide will be disrupted by the end of the year. This along with the subsequent delay in drug launches will pave the way for fully virtual trials.

“Moving forward, healthcare IT companies such as Microsoft, Optum, Intel, and AWS are betting big on enterprise-grade AI platforms that predict pandemics, forecast patient volume across providers, authenticate reimbursement, and drive general well-being of the insured population through medication management and self-care enablement,” Lal said.

(Writing by Gerard Aoun; editing by Seban Scaria)

(gerard.aoun@refinitiv.com)

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