Ahead of Arab Health 2020, Emily Cook, director and head of health at Lexington Communications, looks at the emerging trends in the UK medtech sector as it increasingly looks to new markets post-Brexit.
For well over a century the UK and the nations of the Middle East have built strong, albeit occasionally tested, diplomatic, cultural and commercial ties. The Government estimates that the Middle East accounts for £45 billion of Britain’s overseas trade, and yet our health sector, a shining star of UK PLC, is responsible for only £250 million of exports to the region. With a rapidly ageing population, rising life expectancy, and shortages in the clinical workforce, the healthcare challenges and service demands facing countries across the Middle East will be all too familiar to the UK medtech industry.
This weekend a record number of over 150 UK companies and organisations will travel to Dubai as part of the UK delegation for the Arab Health Exhibition and Congress, the largest health conference in the Middle East and the second largest in the world. As fate would have it, the day after the conference finishes the UK will leave the European Union. Breaking away from the economic ties of the last forty years, we will need to take advantage of the opportunities this offers and mitigate the risks this presents, in part by building stronger economic unions with new friends and old from across the globe. No doubt this will be at the forefront of the minds many of Arab Health’s UK delegates.
Last year 19 joint health projects established so the opportunities for trade, shared learning and growth are clearly being recognised. For medtech two key areas driving forward all technology are data and AI, but what are the underlying trends influencing these and how will their development be shaped by the UK’s departure from the EU?
Data
Providing care for the vast majority of UK citizens from the cradle to the grave, the NHS is famed for having collected and being the effective controller and gatekeeper of the largest set of longitudinal patient data in the world.
With the UK leaving the EU and directing its sights on closer alignment with a US it is widely thought that one of the latter’s opening gambits for any trade deal will be for the UK to replace the EU-derived GDPR requirements with a much looser set of controls for health data. This will allow for patient data to be mined outside of Britian and used to help develop various forms of intellectual property ownership by US firms. These companies could then profit from providing the NHS with access to the technologies the UK patient data has helped to create.
The Life Sciences Industrial Strategy contained the aspiration for the UK to apply this £10 billion data set to domestic purposes and create four £20 billion companies, how UK firms present this opportunity at Arab Health will certainly be one to watch.
AI
Placed a very respectable third behind China and the United States by last year's Global AI Index report, the UK already dominates its European neighbours in terms of investment, innovation and implementation of AI - inward investment into UK AI increased by 17% over the past year, more than the whole of Europe combined. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been driving implementation of AI in their respective countries health systems.
The UK Government has long supported the application of AI in healthcare, launching the national Artificial Intelligence Lab, to help the diffusion of technologies across the NHS. But with developments in AI outpacing the nimblest regulators, the key question for the UK and Middle East is whether future-proofed frameworks can be built which allow technologies to be deployed in real world settings in both regions.
Equally as important is a joined-up approach to harness the data. Technologies that currently exist operate in silos, using different frameworks and standards and storing information in ways that other systems cannot understand. If healthcare partnerships between the UK and Middle East in AI are to truly leverage the power of data, it is vital that standards are developed to break down silos improving the accessibility, utility and scalability of healthcare data.
UK-EU alignment?
Of course, so much of the UK’s future direction will be shaped by the trade agreement between the UK and the EU. With a majority of 80 and a promise to the UK electorate to ‘get Brexit done’, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is keen to progress trade talks as quickly as possible. After the 31st January all eyes will be on the EU, which will agree upon its negotiating mandate in late February.
For the European Parliament to ratify an agreement before the year’s end, the Commission will be working for towards a November deadline. Incidentally around this time Boris Johnson will be hosting the 2020 United Nations Climate Change Conference, one his first global summits as our elected PM. UK and Middle Eastern businesses hoping to maximise the opportunities the next decade will bring will need to act fast to help shape the agenda in the year ahead, ensuring their voices are heard as soon as possible.
