The Digital Health sector closes a record 2020

Here is the effect of the year marked by Covid-19 on digital health

For theDigital Health area, the 2020 it will be remembered as a very special year – starting with its successful start followed by the outbreak of a pandemic that threatened to immobilize investments in the sector. However, the exit from the first global wave of infections from Covid-19 has found extremely reactive markets waiting, which in the third quarter bet like never before on digital healthcare that in times of coronavirus has shown some of its still untapped potential.

The last quarter of the year is now announcing an interlocutory period, in which the enthusiasm of investors expressed in recent months seems to have arisen partially attenuated. According to data from CB Insights, from July to September the entire health sector has indeed collected 22.3 billion dollars in investments, while the forecast for the current quarter is 19,5. When it comes to Digital Health, things are going similarly: from a record third quarter in which companies raised 8.4 billion in funding, for the last quarter of the year the forecast is instead of 5.5 billion spread over 372 different transactions.

If the forecasts for the period October-December 2020 were confirmed, they would still represent better data than all those recorded since mid-2019, with the sole exception of the quarter that ended a few weeks ago. It all happens in a 2020 which has already gone down in history come the most profitable year ever in terms of investments in digital health: the transactions and loans attributable to the period from January to November 2020 have in fact already exceeded the activity levels of 2018 and 2019 over the entire 12-month period, reaching 21.4 billion already collected and with forecasts that for end of the year are of 24 billion.

Investor behavior in recent weeks should therefore be read as the beginning of a settling period, in which the enthusiasm of recent months will be compared with a reality that will be mainly linked to two factors: the first is theevolution of the pandemic Covid-19 and the economies of the affected countries; the second is the degree to which the cultural and behavioral changes triggered in the past months will give birth to one new normal, or how much and to what extent there will be a demand for digital services and technologies in the health sector in the months and years to come.

The variables represented by the evolution of the pandemic and the entry into the scene of a new normal they will have to be weighed in all areas in which companies and startups active in digital health are getting more attention in recent months: from the supply of medicines at home to the remote monitoring of patients via wearable, passing through the comparison and choice of ad hoc insurance plans and for the ” use of machine learning algorithms in the diagnosis and prediction of infectious disease outbreaks. In short, it is also this post-Covid future that investors are already starting to look at.