Market Opportunity

The World Health Organisation estimates that, globally, 1bn adults are overweight, 860m patients are living with chronic medical conditions, such as asthma, diabetes and arthritis, that require long-term treatments, and that 600m people are over the age of 60. These statistics are borne out by financial data that placed the value of the global wellness and health market at more than £120bn in 2007, with expectations that it will triple by 2012.

We will help to open up this market to small and medium-sized Scottish companies who are considering developing applications, products and services to meet consumer demand in this sector by supporting product development, providing advice and access to a network of market contacts, including SMEs, academic institutions and corporate partners. We have a range of services available.

Wellness and Health Focus Now

Future Wellness and Health Focus

Industry Sectors - Where are the opportunities?

The focus of healthcare is moving from treatment to lifestyle management and independent assistive living. This transition is driven by escalating costs, in terms of both overall spend and in the allocation of that spend on long term condition management. The need to focus on lifestyle management and independent/assistive living is essential in addressing the future challenges that the healthcare industry is likely to face and WHI believe their is great opportunities to develop new products, serivices and application for these growing sectors. The two main focus's for the WHI project is lifestyle management and indpendent assistive living.

Lifestyle Management

Products that enable individuals to personally maintain their health by being proactively responsible for their own wellbeing and managing their life this includes products and services for the committed individuals who follows rigorous exercise regimes and strictly controls their diet to improve health and fitness. In addition using early diagnosis and tailored care to limit the impact of chronic conditions such as asthma or diabetes on quality of life, such products minimise effects of diseases while reducing the demand on healthcare services.

According to the “Global Wellbeing Market 2009” report: “Chronic illness, resulting from changes in lifestyle and diet, is more prevalent and has made people conscious of wellness. An ageing society uses preventative and/or self-care medicine to avoid or delay hospitalisation, improve quality of life and save on healthcare spending at a later stage. In a major shift with past behaviour, people seek "wellness" from outside the traditional medical setting.” WHI understands there is a growing demand for propositions in this area and this can be applied to a broader category of wellness products including; consumer electronics, web portals and services, medical devices and over the counter diagnostics for prevention and detection.

Independent/Assistive Living

Using advances in technology and service delivery to promote independent living and social care. Connecting the community by providing reliable, regular access to family, friends, carers and community members, and so maintaining a level of independence allowed by health and mobility which products and services.

Other

Innovation and Improvement supports the NHS and other healthcare organisations to transform healthcare for patients and the public by rapidly developing and spreading new ways of working, new technology and world-class leadership.

There is a range of services that are at the edge of medicine/healthcare and information technology:

• Electronic Medical Records: enable easy communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, care team, pharmacy).
• Telemedicine: includes all types of physical and psychological measurements that do not require a patient to travel to a specialist. When this service works, patients need to travel less to a specialist or conversely the specialist has a larger catchment area.
• Consumer Health Informatics: both healthy individuals and patients want to be informed on medical topics.
• Health knowledge management: an overview of latest medical journals, best practice guidelines or epidemiological tracking. Examples include physician resources such as Medscape and MDLinx.
• Virtual healthcare teams: consist of healthcare professionals who collaborate and share information on patients through digital equipment (for transmural care).
• mHealth or m-Health: includes the use of mobile devices in collecting aggregate and patient level health data, providing healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vitals, and direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine).
• Medical research: uses eHealth Grids that provide powerful computing and data management capabilities to handle large amounts of heterogeneous data.
• Healthcare Information Systems: also often refer to software solutions for appointment scheduling, patient data management, work schedule management and other administrative tasks surrounding health. Whether these tasks are part of eHealth depends on the chosen definition, they do, however, interface with most eHealth implementations due to the complex relationship between administration and healthcare at Health Care Providers.

Got an Idea?
If you have an idea around either of the above areas we can help - just contact us.