by Scott Denne
UnitedHealth Group becomes the latest acquirer to scoop up a patient-monitoring vendor with its purchase of Vivify Health. Through the first 10 months of the year, there’s been a surge of acquisitions that involve patient monitoring as insurance carriers and medical software firms seek to capitalize on a nascent market that’s buoyed by the two most potent themes in emerging technology today – the Internet of things (IoT) and machine learning.
According to 451 Research‘s M&A KnowledgeBase, the acquisition of Vivify, a developer of software for remote patient monitoring and care, marks the eleventh tech deal of 2019 involving a company with patient-monitoring capabilities. That’s up from just six last year and two more than we’ve recorded in any full year. The expanding interest in patient monitoring comes as new technologies are emerging to enable healthcare providers to monitor patients remotely (through wearables and other connected devices) and run analysis on the monitoring data they’ve long collected in hospitals.
In 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: AI & Machine Learning, Adoption & Uses Cases report, 45% of respondents in the healthcare industry said they currently use machine learning for patient monitoring. Related to that, in our Voice of the Enterprise: IoT, Organizational Dynamics survey, 72% of healthcare respondents said their organizations have the endpoints in place to collect data for patient monitoring, yet few of them have such a project up and running.
Improved patient monitoring could lead to lower costs for insurance providers like UnitedHealth, although it’s still early days for this corner of healthcare. Our IoT study shows that more organizations have the endpoints in place than are actually deploying IoT-related monitoring projects. Still, the potential cost savings and healthcare’s affinity for IoT could lead to an expansion of patient monitoring, as our survey showed that healthcare remains ahead of other verticals in IoT adoption.
For those seeking a more detailed view of the rapidly emerging IoT market, 451 Research will be hosting a special event next week focused on the technology and implementation trends that are spurring the record M&A activity in IoT. Clients can register for our Cycle of Innovation Summit in Boston next Tuesday morning (11/5) on the event’s website.
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