Digital Health Twins - The Great Enablers Of New Healthcare Ecosystems?

As a Deloitte report highlighted recently digital twins are designed and deployed to enable virtual collaboration, absorb and process big data, as well as assist us with managing the physical world in a more efficient and safe manner. 

There are several industries that have shown significant advancements in using digital twin capabilities, such as automotive, aircraft, energy, urban planning and healthcare to only name few. The pandemic impact and disruption caused to the global economy have only accelerated the pace and adoption of digital twins development globally. Therefore it is expected that the digital twins market will reach $48.2B by 2026 at a CAGR of 58%. While currently the North American market owns the largest share, it is expected that the APAC market will experience the fastest growth over the next few years.

Per Gartner, a digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system. The implementation of a digital twin is an encapsulated software object or model that mirrors a unique physical object, process, organization, person or other abstraction

The design and deployment of digital twins is complex and intimately connected to other digital technologies such as cloud computing, AI, IoT, 5G networks, blockchain and virtual, augmented or mixed reality. It is expected that the rate adoption for all these technologies will have a profound influence on the digital twin industry. Up to date System Digital Twins have dominated all industries, however experts agree that product and process digital twin types will be on the rise over the next few years.

The benefits we can reap as a society by deploying these digital highly versatile avatars are vast as they can optimize efficiency, reduce long term costs, enhance quality and further our research capabilities. 

Healthcare is a wonderful example where digital health twins could potentially solve a lot of major challenges we are facing in healthcare globally. From a healthcare delivery perspective they could enhance quality and safety of healthcare, improve clinical decision support systems, accelerate the transition from research to clinical deployment of various medications and expedite the approval of various new precision medicine solutions. For the medical device industry it could also mean a much shorter approval cycle and a higher safety profile. In medical education they could contribute to a more interactive teaching methdology and a more effective safety training. For various disciplines like surgery, oncology or precision medicine having these digital twins could be revolutionary and disruptive. Last but not least, digital twins would also allow us to develop a hyperconnected global healthcare network and derive important insights that would drive research and the development of innovative diagnostic or treatment methodologies.

However, in order to be successful, we will also need to overcome some of the challenges faced with any emerging technologies and mitigate against the risks of maleficent use. Specifically, ethics, cybersecurity concerns, and cross-industry standards will be on the agenda of most enterprises wishing to deploy digital twins.

The journey is long, however all the latest research points towards an accelerated adoption of digital technologies. By a combined deployment of digital twins with all other emerging technologies we could potentially build a highly performant global Internet of Medicine, which could become the conduit for a global healthcare ecosystem. By leveraging the full capabilities of brain-computer interfaces, implants, wearables, augmented intelligence, blockchain, 5G networks speeds and cloud computing we would achieve an exponential effect. Healthcare Futurists would even venture to envision the existence of state of the art Smart Cities where digital healthcare twins, digital finance twins and digital legal twins would be part of daily life.