Research Reports

Electronic health records (EHRs) are hardly new; the goal of digitizing patient health records dates prior to the emergence of the Internet. In the US, however, the government’s investment of nearly $20 billon for the “meaningful use” of EHRs as part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, has placed new urgency on adoption.

Delivering new functionality to business users is the highest priority for those pharmaceutical companies looking to invest in cloud computing. This bodes well for SaaS in particular as IT departments look to quickly deploy business process-centric functionality via solutions such as CRM.

Ophthalmology encompasses some lucrative markets, but the future of leading brands in glaucoma and AMD is under threat, and while established markets like glaucoma and conjunctivitis have many therapeutic options, diabetic retinopathy remains largely untapped. Key opinion leaders agree there is unmet need in terms of drug delivery methods and dose frequency across ophthalmology diseases.

The key therapeutic areas that are expected to receive the greatest focus are cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, cancer diagnosis and infectious diseases. Cancer diagnostics attracts huge amounts of attention owing to the inferior ability of conventional methods of diagnosis to detect diseases in their early stages.

The fragmented nature of the healthcare systems in the United Arab Emirates remains despite the implementation of health reforms in the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The two major emirates are currently at different stages in the development and implementation of reform with the gap between them in terms of access to healthcare and pharmaceuticals widening, with Abu Dhabi leading the way.

Diagnostic practice is undergoing a quiet revolution, with in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests moving out of the centralized hospital laboratory to POCT locations. POC tests are more expensive than lab-based tests, but promise to reduce the overall cost of healthcare while improving the quality of outcomes. They are thus attractive to manufacturers and increasingly in demand.

Supportive care in oncology is defined as those products used to prevent and/or treat the adverse side effects that arise as a result of the tumor itself or administration of anticancer therapies The supportive care market is potentially vast, therefore this report focuses on the cytopenias (anemia, neutropenia and thrombocytopenia), chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, and bone metastases.

Courtesy of the patent cliff, the pharmaceutical industry is set for a dramatic slow down in revenue growth from 2011. Industry players are therefore looking to implement strategies which will cushion them against the anticipated revenue short-fall, with diversification away from pharmaceuticals into other healthcare sectors one avenue under consideration.

The gastrointestinal market is mature and genericized. Over 2004-08, most of the market leading drug classes in this therapy area reported negative or low compound annual growth rates (CAGRs). The largest drug class of the therapy area, proton pump inhibitors, which constituted a market share of 53.2%, recorded a CAGR of 4.8%.