Such outcomes make the return on investment for digital twins in this operational context immediately clear, which means that solutions are more likely to be accepted and thus purchased by decision makers. These types of solutions also don’t need to seek regulatory approval, a significant barrier faced by other types of solution which increases the cost of development.

Other multibillion-dollar healthtech giants such as Philips and GE Healthcare have also made similar investments in recent years, with GE Healthcare’s Hospital of the Future Simulation Suite designed specifically for modular use in healthcare, allowing healthcare institutions to incrementally model an ED, then add the OR, then an entire hospital, before adding further hospitals into a network.


These products have sparked attention from several significant healthcare players, but because these vendors already have such large installed bases with which to get a head start on commercialising solutions, there is limited opportunity for new blood to enter the scene and impact competitive dynamics.

Physiological digital twins will have a higher barrier to entry for clinical use and can vary in complexity.
The human body is so intricate that we haven’t begun to touch the surface of understanding it fully. However, there are some things that we do know well, such as structural components, for example.

One popular area of focus in digital twins is organ modelling. An example that is attracting a lot of attention recently lies in cardiac care, where computer simulation is increasingly being viewed as an essential design tool by cardiac device and services companies. In these scenarios, digital twin software can help visualise and predict the impact of new techniques and solutions for surgical intervention. These can help inform designs and reduce costs associated with prototyping and testing, allowing companies to get products and services to market faster.

One such company helping provide these kinds of solutions is PrediSurge, a French startup that offers PlanOp for MedTech, digital twin software designed to simulate cardiac interventions. This allows the company to address both the life sciences and clinical markets, which is advantageous as it can start generating incoming whilst collecting the necessary evidence to achieve regulatory approval and scale its clinical use.

Many others are also working to develop similar software. Siemens Healthineers, for example, is developing a digital twin of the heart to improve drug treatment and simulate cardiac catheter interventions. European startup FEops is another vendor which has received its first regulatory approval and commercialised the Feops Heartguide platform in 2019. The company also has solutions tailored to MedTech and clinical environments and offers physicians insights to evaluate device sizing and positioning preoperatively.

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