Seven Predictions for the Life Science, Health and Wellness Industries In 2023
SUMMARY
For 2023, LINUS is keeping an eye on seven emerging trends we believe will continue to drive change in our industry.
From generative AI to age reversal to rewilding for individual health, we predict that this year will be marked by more integration over the next year.
Over the last few years, our team has identified emerging trends — from home being the center of health to the proliferation of consumer vs medical grade diagnostics — that help inform our work and make a lasting impact for our clients.
Blink and an emerging trend from yesterday will be the new norm of today.
At the beginning of each new year, the strategists at LINUS assess and identify the patterns, forces and trends that will drive change for life science, health, and wellness in 2023.
1. Can storefront care save primary care?
If the last few years were marked by the expansion of retail giants like Walmart and Best Buy entering the healthcare space, the next year (and years to come) will be judged by their ability to redefine primary care.
Spurred by a tripledemic and growing wait times at both emergency rooms and urgent care centers, primary care is turning into reactionary service rather than a proactive visit — a phenomenon we’re calling storefront care. With more and more patients skipping their general primary care visits, here’s an imminent risk in treating primary care as just ‘storefront’ care. This demise in primary care could result in an increase of chronic diseases or an uptick of late-stage cancer diagnoses.
There’s no doubt the benefit emerging players to healthcare brings to health deserts; however there is a fear of the new norm of primary care being one that doesn’t benefit patients in the long-term. We hope to see efforts in limiting primary care to just a series of transactions and acute care to have more of a focus on preventative, proactive care.
How might we get ahead of storefront care to ensure primary care remains a proactive visit rather than reactive?
2. Generative AI as a force for good
With the proliferation of innovation and technologies like ChatGPT, the integration of dialogue and generative AI in healthcare is inevitable. Leveraged responsibly — with both the patient and the HCP in mind — chatbots may provide a more accessible and relevant digital front door to care. In countless research projects at LINUS, we consistently hear clinicians’ need for less paperwork and more interactions. In a survey from the American Medical Association, it reported that nearly 63% of physicians are experiencing symptoms of burnout. That’s up from ~40% from last year. Even further, 20% of physicians intend to leave practice within the next few years. Already, we’re seeing the implications of how generative AI can increase accessibility (i.e. providing legal advice to those who cannot afford it or negotiating lower bills) and is leveraged as a revolutionary asset. While we recognize the dark side of chatbot-driven AI, there is a future that responsibly embraces its role in healthcare in order to produce less adverse outcomes than what the current discourse suggests.
How might we leverage the potential of ChatGPT to make a positive impact on physician-patient relationships?
3. The age of age reversal
Age is just a number? Think again. Tomorrow’s technology uses epigenetics, protein testing, and drug advancement to prove that our biological age can be a biomarker or metric indicative of our overall health, just like high-blood pressure or BMI.
Quantifying our biological age and using ‘age scores’ can tell us if we’re accelerating, slowing down, maintaining, or even reversing our longevity and biological age based on known behaviors. Combining this idea with other holistic health practices like meditation, activities, and mood could create a ‘daily score’.
There’s a growing trend of reducing our epigenetic age to create an ‘autonomous self’ via tests or app-based recommendations or markers like proteins and epigenetics. In a self-run experiment, entrepreneur Bryan Johnson ran Blueprint to reduce his epigenetic age .73 years per month. Although promising, using epigenetics and other breakthroughs to calculate age scores is not sophisticated enough to fight death. Technologies like InsideTracker promise science-based optimization as a path to living longer and healthier and pharmaceutical drugs like Metformin are all playing a role in this frontier. Its advancement is dependent on the FDA finding a way to endorse such technology.
4. The normalization of AI in scientific breakthroughs
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to make breakthrough after breakthrough in science. One notable area is in the drug discovery process and how pharmaceutical companies may adopt AI techniques to identify biological targets — a time-consuming and costly process. Nimbus Therapeutics announced the first pharmaceutical that was solely created by AI. At the risk of hindering the speed of progress, the integration of breakthroughs — specifically with epigenetics — is a lesson in understanding and knowing where AI’s limitations are now.
How might non-traditional players in life science leverage AI in drug development? What should we be prepared for as an industry?
5. The two-way street illusion
“I’m doing everything I’m supposed to, why am I still the same?” This is a question that often comes up in conversations and discussions about the future of wearables and health-enabled technologies.
Last year, we talked a lot about how consumers are beginning to ‘reject the data dump’ wearables and other health-enabled technologies drops on consumers. What we’re really looking for is meaning in the metrics.
In a report with STAT, The Markup investigated 50 direct-to-consumer telehealth companies found, “quick, online access to medications often comes with a hidden cost for patients: Virtual care websites were leaking sensitive medical information they collect to the world’s largest advertising platforms.”
When consumers purchase and use digital health technology, they enter an unspoken agreement that we will receive useful information about our health. But is this just a trick of the mirror? In our own experiments with wearables and digital health technologies that claim to be customized, we’re finding generalized recommendations build for anyone and everyone, not for THE one.
How might the industry consider bringing humanity back in and making this two-way street of data collection less of a data hangover and make data count for consumers?
6. Rewilding for health
The value of nature and interacting with natural places in the context of health is nearly immeasurable. Yet finding after finding continues to prove that nature adds value to individual health. In 2023, we anticipate a shift in rhetoric when we talk about climate change and the destruction of natural places. Do we need to resort to selfishness to save the environment?
While sustainable practices and the critical role of a healthy ecosystem is deeply important to many, re-framing the conversation about saving the world for ‘you’ versus ‘we’ could result in a renewed sense of a healthier planet not for the general ‘we’ but for individuals and our health. While foraging, ice plunges and forest bathing are far from new concepts in the wild wellness space, we anticipate a broader awareness and acceptance as ways to turn an eye toward the importance of rewilding humans and acting responsibly for the planet.
By emphasizing how closely tied our health is to a healthy environment, the crusade to save the world can become a personal goal of wellness rather than a societal failure. How might we change the dialogue around sustainability efforts?
7. Are we there yet?
While the pandemic itself may not be technically over, the pandemic effect has initiated itself into the rhetoric of the new normal, making it very unlikely that we’ll return to the way things were. But are we squarely in a new era? We believe that more change and progress is to come before we can officially call our current circumstances “the New Normal.” If there’s anything that the pandemic’s effects did teach us, it’s that widespread behavioral change is possible. As AI continues to mature, and new ways rapidly become the old ways, we expect that by the end of 2023, we’ll look back at even its earliest days and see a marked change in progress.