How Consumer Empowerment Will Drive Healthtech's Future

In this segment from Motley Fool Live, recorded on Feb. 17, Fool.com contributor Rachel Warren is joined by Heather Gates, Managing Director at Deloitte, to talk about new trends in healthcare technology and how they're transforming the industry.

10 stocks we like better than Walmart
When our award-winning analyst team has an investing tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

They just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Walmart wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.

See the 10 stocks

Stock Advisor returns as of 2/14/21

Heather Gates: Consumers are more and more taking ownership of their healthcare. You've also seen this great emergence in wellness. There are whole new categories of healthcare health and wellness that are emerging, creating bigger markets and really putting consumers in the driver's seat of what they want to see and experience.

A couple of key areas. You've got the macroeconomic environment which I talked about, which is interest rates have traditionally, a little on the rise at the moment, but they have been low, and access to capital has been fairly easy in the scheme of things historically. All of that enables new solutions to thrive and new innovations to come to market that will continue to elevate healthtech in the overall market.

Generally, just the acceleration of technologies supporting the need for greater access and delivery of healthcare which we touched on. I think specifically, artificial intelligence and maybe robotics process automation will come together in a few areas that really support what we call the educated consumer in healthcare.

Use of AI to make really informed decisions based on massive data analytics around patient outcomes. We can study that when you give someone a certain treatment at a certain point in time, how has that influenced an outcome? Before having access to all of that data, those types of analyses were not possible.

Running platforms against electronic records, which really, again, might suggest different potential therapies for individuals. AI is really a big thing and I think consumers are wanting and asking for more. The big rub in all of this is, as we want more, we think we've already paid for it because we're paying our insurance premiums. But have those insurance premiums really paid for all of these new discoveries, innovations, etc? So that's the interesting rub.

The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.