WHO flags distrust in science as a major health challenge: PRmoment Health Comms Review

PRmoment's weekly 'Healthcare Communications Review' column looks at the biggest healthcare trends every week and analyses the communications implications. In partnership with SPAG, A Finn Partners Company.

Last week, WHO's chief scientist, Dr Soumya Swaminathan painted a picture of the future of health, the main challenges ahead and the technological leaps that could happen.

This is what stood out from Dr Swaminathan's video address on the occasion of World Health Day 2023 with its theme of 'Health for All.'

These are the major takeaways from what she said:

• Genomics emerges as a major health technology of the future.
• The rapidly rising use of technology in health raises questions of ethics. Dr Swaminathan recommends setting up bioethics committees to look at these challenges.
• As prevention matters more to achieve health for all, health communication has never been more important.
• Mistrust in science represents a major stakeholder engagement challenge.

The entire video can be seen here:

Digital Health is on the rise 

A crucial part of the future of health will be digital health. This is distinct from health tech which includes devices.

Galen Growth’s Global 2022 Year End Report looked at the global ecosystem developments throughout the year and highlighted trends to expect in 2023: The transition from Digital Health 1.0 era to the 2.0 era has sped up with Digital Health reaching an inflexion point and evolving into a more mature ecosystem enabled by numerous factors:

• Increase of unique investors: 62% of acquisitions in 2022 were venture-to-venture. As funding declines, consolidation is taking place through acquisition of companies by maturer industry players.

• Biopharma companies have at least five Digital Health ventures in their partnership portfolios, with the number increasing YOY due to the margins of healthcare incumbents increasingly being pressured lower and leadership teams scrambling to improve productivity
• . Biopharma has the opportunity to accelerate innovation through partnering with Digital Health ventures in Research Solutions and Clinical Trials in order to fill in the gaps of missing capabilities to boost their pipeline

• 21% of partnerships with Digital Health ventures were captured by healthcare systems and providers who are driven by a need for greater productivity and are demanding end-to-end solutions that don’t require a patchwork of software solutions or apps for a single patient or physician. 

In other news 

1) Covid cases are on the rise, wear a mask.

2) Indian pharma market expected to touch 13% of the global market from 0.

That's it for this week. Special thanks to SPAG, a FINN Partner company for their ongoing support for this weekly column.

News for the column curated by Impact Research and Measurement