Internet Trends: Reshaping The Future of Education and Healthcare

Mary Meeker, a Partner at KPCB (one of the world’s leading venture capital firms), recently shared her annual report on Internet trends. For those unfamiliar with Meeker’s highly regarded work, she produces one of the tech industry’s most widely anticipated reports. Techies and tech investors alike wait with baited breath to see how Meeker has interpreted key trends across the industry, and this year’s report is another gold mine of tech data and internet pearls.

According to Meeker’s 2014 report, there are now 2.6 billion internet users vs. 5.6 billion mobile phone subscribers. While overall internet growth is slowing, mobile usage and mobile data consumption are the big winners once again with mobile data consumption up 81% as the world turns more to tablets (439 million devices) and smartphones (1.6 billion devices), especially to watch video. Coupled with the continued explosion in mobile data usage, the digital universe of information grew by 50% in the past year to more than 4 zetabytes (that’s 4.194304e+12 gigabytes if you’re counting), with 2/3 of that information created and consumed by people watching videos, sharing images, and using social media.

Globally, mobile now accounts for 25 percent of web usage, up from 14 percent a year ago and Meeker sees people enabled with mobile devices and sensors uploading troves of findable and sharable data. While this media creation and consumption trend is consumer driven it is having a profound impact on multiple industries and in particular Meeker describes how it is reshaping the future of education and healthcare, two key sectors Meeker highlights as reaching inflection points over the past year.

According to Meeker education and healthcare are being disrupted by technology and the continued advance of the internet age. In both cases, Meeker sees connected technology having a transformational impact as the creation and consumption of digital content sweeps through both industries. Meeker highlights the staggering growth in cheaper online courses offered by Duolingo (25M+ users), Coursera (7m+ online students), and EverFi (7m certified students) and the proliferation of digital tools across healthcare. Today 84% of hospitals now use a fully functioning electronic medical record while 52% of consumers want increased access to health apps and website rankings for quality, satisfaction, and patients reviews of doctors and hospitals.

Most importantly, the intersection of health and education may see the biggest opportunity of all as $100 billion a year is spent on “avoidable” hospitalization that could be reduced through better education. This fact and the rising digital tide is not lost on healthcare professionals as 97% of surveyed clinicians plan to utilize online educational tools and programs in the coming year. We see this every day at ArcheMedX as medical educators increasingly use platforms such as the ArcheViewer to dramatically improve learning and accelerate the dissemination of best practices across dozens of clinical areas.

The convergence of these trends opens the door to new innovations and countless possibilities, and the innovators and entrepreneurs among us will use them to reshape the future before our very eyes.

Best,
Joel Selzer
CEO – ArcheMedX