UBS Wealth Management Singapore released its ‘Year Ahead 2021’ outlook that declares the coming year as “a year of renewal”. The Swiss multinational investment bank is betting big on healthtech being one of the sectors to deliver “the next big thing” of the decade.
At Vault Dragon, we’re not only pleased about this positive sentiment towards healthtech but also proud that our digital health solutions are already disrupting healthcare delivery in Asia in the ways predicted by the report.
Here are a few highlights from the UBS Wealth Management outlook for 2021 that reaffirm Vault Dragon’s founding vision and have us doubly excited for our journey of disrupting healthcare delivery in Asia.
Year of Renewal
UBS Wealth Management expects 2021 to be a year when “we will see a world that is steadily returning to normal, despite continued uncertainty, while also rapidly accelerating into a transformed future”. The outlook predicts investor sentiment in 2021 to lean towards “going cyclical, small, and global as the sectors and markets most heavily affected by lockdowns start to revive”.
Fast-changing World
The ‘Year Ahead 2021’ outlook offers a peek into the “investment implications of our fast-changing world”. As the economy readies itself for the future, the report recommends that “investors with an eye on the long term will need to add exposure to the disruptors making our world more digital and sustainable”. In the decade ahead, it suggests investors “buy into sustainability and diversify into private markets”.
Kick-starting Growth
According to UBS Wealth Management, the next decade’s disruptors are most likely to originate from the healthtech, green tech and fintech sectors, propelled by global 5G rollouts. “We’ve worked to identify market segments containing stocks that could see earnings more than triple over the next ten years thanks to a large potential market (over USD 200bn), a disruptive catalyst to spur growth for the decade ahead, and a cyclical catalyst to kick-start things in 2021,” states the report.
Delivering Healthcare Digitally
UBS Wealth Management is betting big on healthtech for the next decade thanks to the new normal enforced globally in 2020. “The pandemic has simultaneously increased patient focus on health outcomes and reduced people’s ability to access care and governments’ capacity to pay for that care,” says the report. This paradox has accelerated the significance of healthtech multifold. “We think health technology will play a critical role in improving the efficiency and quality of healthcare in the decade ahead.”
Speaking Numbers
Bringing out the numbers, the outlook illustrates, “Global healthcare spending reached USD 7.8tr (10% of GDP) in 2017, according to the World Health Organization. Yet a significant proportion of this—up to 25% in the US, according to the JAMA Network—was wasted in 2019 due to failures of coordination, pricing, or delivery, or overly complicated processes and treatments.” These factors coupled with the fact that “the global over-65 population set to grow 60% to one billion by 2030, we see significant growth potential if emergent technologies can help providers create a more efficient and holistic healthcare system.”
Smart Diagnostics
The outlook highlights telemedicine, transformative treatments and advanced diagnostics as its three main focus areas of potential growth. Of which, Vault Dragon is already pioneering digital health solutions in telemedicine and advanced diagnostics. “Technologies could enable enhanced diagnostics, boosting efficiency and improving patient outcomes,” states the report. “Combining connected sensors that gather data at the point of care with artificial intelligence could allow for quicker and more accurate diagnoses,” it adds.
Remote Care
Telemedicine is positively predicted to be the ultimate disruption in healthcare this decade. “The use of telemedicine has exploded since the onset of the pandemic, and we expect these higher utilization levels to persist, even if a near-term slowdown is possible as economies reopen,” states the report.
It continues, “Over time, we think that healthcare will be transformed from an episodic service into a lifelong process of managing and maintaining health, driven by technologically savvy health consumers.”
The outlook predicts that the total US telemedicine market could grow by around 17% a year from 2019 to 2024 to USD 35bn. As for the Chinese market, it states, “the currently smaller Chinese market could grow by nearly 50% a year, overtaking the US market in size by 2023.”
[Originally published by Vault Dragon in December 2020]
