Looking at the trend and end of digital therapy from the payer

Similar to Internet medical care, the payer determines the development trend of digital therapy
.

However, because the market ceiling of digital therapy itself is very low, it cannot be continuously expanded like online consultation.

From the perspective of the global market, due to online consultations being catalyzed by the epidemic, the market space for the next 5-10 years has been overdrawn, and investors are looking to other areas of online medical care
.

From the perspective of the US market, digital therapy has gained favor because it can be sold to enterprises and commercial insurance companies at a higher monthly fee

Prescription digital therapies have encountered similar problems in Germany
.

As the first country in the world to include digital therapy in medical insurance, although Germany has approved the first DiGA (Digital Therapy APP) to enter medical insurance from September 2020, medical insurance has already included digital therapy in reimbursement, but from the perspective of usage, even After being included in medical insurance, Germany's digital therapy products have not seen explosive growth

The embarrassment of prescription digital therapies clarifies two key issues for market development: accessibility and efficacy
.

First, from the perspective of accessibility, whether a prescription is issued is the key to accessibility
.

Non-prescription digital therapies are purchased by companies in bulk, and employees directly choose whether to participate according to their own wishes

Secondly, because digital therapy does not require patients to perform any self-management like medicines, whether it can bring efficacy depends mainly on the patient's compliance, which still cannot be separated from the dilemma of traditional health management-brought by inhumanity Uncertainty of efficacy
.

Therefore, Livongo and Omada, which are currently successful in the field of chronic diseases, rely on heavy human input, and a large number of health managers are invested online to perform heavy management of users

Of course, in some fields, especially in the field of mental health, due to poor service accessibility and weak payer coverage, digital therapy can obtain a certain amount of self-paid users
.

However, the churn rate of self-paid users is high, which leads to poor stability of the company's revenue, and after a certain volume, it cannot expand the scale, and has to transform to the B-end, hoping to use the payer to expand its revenue

If we return to the Chinese market, the self-pay market can only be concentrated in the areas of psychotherapy that are just needed, especially autism and Alzheimer's, but users will still see the effect
.

In fact, pure online is subject to the uncertainty of curative effect and cannot be commercialized.

From the perspective of the German model, even if digital therapy can be covered by medical insurance, it cannot promote its own scale, let alone the possibility of commercialization
.

Moreover, the wide coverage of German medical insurance is compatible with its strong financing ability.

China's commercial insurance market is relatively weak, and medical insurance has entered the Red Sea market as a whole.
All health management-related services are a means of acquiring customers, and it is not ruled out that some companies will include digital therapy
.
However, judging from the previous practice of incorporating chronic disease management into insurance reimbursement, no product can truly bring about a substantial increase in related services, and the actual promotion of digital therapy is almost non-existent
.

Of course, just like Internet healthcare, pharmaceutical companies are most interested in digital therapy
.
Just like insurance, it is entirely possible for pharmaceutical companies to purchase digital therapies and deliver them to patients as adjuvant treatments
.
However, with the advancement of centralized procurement, the profit margin of pharmaceutical companies has been greatly compressed, and the proportion of products that can have enough profits to be given to patients will become less and less
.

Therefore, the development of digital therapy in the Chinese market only repeats the story of the previous Internet medical treatment.
In the end, digital therapy can only become a channel for pharmaceutical companies to expand, especially a tool for unified prescriptions
.
Of course, just like Internet healthcare, some companies still rely on other income to survive
.
With the tightening of supervision, the dissipation of this market trend is foreseeable
.