Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Patient Safety in Healthcare, Forecast to 2022, assesses the 30 most pressing safety adverse events affecting patients, caregivers, and healthcare organizations across the globe.
Cumulatively, these adverse episodes affected an estimated 91.8 million patient admissions across the US and Western Europe resulting in around 1.95 million deaths at an average mortality of 2.1 percent and a significantly higher morbidity. The study also covers innovative and promising solutions, future market potential, convergence of new technologies, key market participants, competitive landscape, and investment trends.
In the next four years, adverse patient safety events in the United States and Western Europe such as healthcare associated infections (HAIs), sepsis, medication safety, pressure ulcers, diagnostic errors, antibiotic resistance and hand hygiene non-compliance will drive an estimated healthcare cost burden of $383.7 billion.
While some adverse events, such as medication safety and hand hygiene non-compliance, are relatively well addressed by current industry solutions, under-penetrated areas such as antibiotic resistance, pressure ulcers, sepsis and unnecessary ED (emergency department) admissions will be the high opportunity growth areas for future.
Further trends driving growth in the patient safety market include:
- A move to value-based, quality-driven reimbursement models;
- Advancements in medical, surgical, and patient care technologies;
- Integration between med-tech and digital health technologies such as data analytics, remote monitoring, and surveillance;
- Data interoperability and enhanced use of predictive analytics for outcomes improvement; and
- Emerging use of newer technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and wearables to limit patient safety violations.
“Up to 17 percent of all hospitalizations are affected by one or more adverse events and around 15% of hospital expenditure is attributable to addressing them. The fact that 30 to 70 percent of these are potentially avoidable makes it imperative to prevent them from happening,” said Anuj Agarwal, Transformational Healthcare Senior Research Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “To reap growth opportunities, care providers and market participants should target their patient safety value proposition toward low-penetration areas with significant disruptive potential like antibiotic resistance, cybersecurity, avoidable ED admissions, pressure ulcers, and sepsis.”
In the next four years, Frost & Sullivan predicts the following developments:
- Patient safety transitioning from an ancillary to a core value proposition for care providers;
- High adoption of patient and asset tracking as well as identification technologies;
- Increased consolidation in the industry with large med-tech companies going for provision of targeted solutions for key unmet need areas;
- Significant use of remote healthcare technologies such as Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) coupled with increasing healthcare data exchange, leading to disproportionate increase in cybersecurity risks such as protected heath information (PHI) compromise and medical device/ implants data breach; and
- Collaboration to develop guidance documents and draft policies for best practices on risk mitigation.
“The lack of clarity on available business models, fragmented and isolated vendor solutions addressing a specific set of issues in a particular segment, and disagreement on ideal patient safety solutions and implementation costs are major hurdles currently facing the market,” observed Agarwal.
