Picture the following: You wake up from a fitful night of sleep feeling under the weather. From your sickbed, a voice assistant gathers your symptoms, accesses your patient history, and orders a prescription for you. But you want to talk to a human as well, so you initiate a video chat with your physician using your tablet. She has the last year’s worth of physical activity data on hand from your smartwatch and your individual genome profile to curate the best course of treatment.

This is the vision for a digital, personalized, automated future of healthcare — and venture capitalists bet billions on it. Health tech is one of the fastest-growing markets that Forrester tracks. It represents over $77 billion in total private investments. In partnership with Venture Scanner, we track over 2,000 companies with innovations ranging from digital medical devices to healthcare robotics to telehealth and other virtual care solutions.


Like many of the emerging technology markets we monitor, advances in health tech are buoyed by the combination of discrete technologies such as AI and IoT. Companies such as CarePredict infuse medical devices with machine-learning capabilities to alleviate the need for manual clinician attention and alert doctors only when intervention is vital. And look no further than Apple’s integration of an electrocardiogram in its newest Apple Watch to see the collision course between health tech and IoT hitting the mainstream.

Forrester clients can check out our Tech Tide™ on virtual care to see the relative maturity of the technologies that make up this space. We’ll also publish new research later this year with our colleague Arielle Trzcinski highlighting virtual-care startups that are pushing healthcare into the digital age.

If you need to keep a pulse on startup activity in emerging technology markets, Forrester can help. Start by searching for our New Tech research on Forrester.com, and if you want to go deeper, ask your account manager to learn about our startup scouting service.

[This post was coauthored by my colleague, Christian Austin]