Thinklabs Announces Company Growth, Market Trends that Point to the Future of Healthcare Technology in 2021
NEW YORK, Feb. 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Thinklabs, maker of the smallest, most powerful stethoscope in the world, released today customer insights and company growth that demonstrate the permanent transformations in healthcare delivery catalyzed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Thinklabs’ sales grew by more than 70% in 2020, as digital technologies became increasingly essential to medical practice to both protect healthcare professionals and keep patients safe.
“At its core, Thinklabs is an engineering design company, which means that we solve emerging problems — the more unusual the challenge, the more creative we become,” says Clive Smith, founder and CEO of Thinklabs. “The digital stethoscope does what conventional stethoscopes cannot do, and with the pandemic, that universe of problems expanded overnight: Listening to patients through PAPRs, reducing the use of personal protective equipment by listening from outside the exam room, doing patient exams in drive-through clinics, and doing more telemedicine.”
Smith added that Thinklabs’ production had to multiply in the midst of a global supply chain that was under catastrophic stress, stating, “It felt like a world war had broken out. I even went back to read news articles from the early 1940’s, which taught me that humans have no idea how long a crisis will last and how deep it will become. It became more clear that we were going to be in this a lot longer than just the time it took to flatten the curve: This was going to be a long haul.”
Thinklabs’ depth of experience in areas from infection control to telemedicine placed it at the center of demand for stethoscopes that could address the sudden changes in medical practice. The Thinklabs One digital stethoscope has a unique form factor that allows for Safe Distance Auscultation™, the process by which healthcare workers can listen to patients’ hearts and lungs while wearing PPE, or from a distance with the use of external speakers, or earbuds or headphones that fit over or under PPE.
The need is global, with increased demand from international markets, which represent over a quarter of Thinklabs’ sales. The company has seen significant demand from hospitals that have been overwhelmed with patients in the past 10-12 months. Thinklabs experienced growth across the multiple sectors that it serves, indicating a general increase in demand for digital stethoscopes beyond Covid-specific applications.
Additionally, Thinklabs continuously gathers insights from its global customer base of physicians and other healthcare workers. Patterns that emerged in the past year include significant trends, such as one-third of healthcare workers reporting working from home, and physicians indicating that they expect to continue working from home beyond the pandemic. Thinklabs’ data also shows nearly half of healthcare workers predict it will take 12-23 months for healthcare practices to return to something resembling pre-Covid practice.
“Based on the insights we’ve gleaned from our extensive network of customers, digital is the new paradigm for the practice of medicine, and the industry will never go back to the way it was before the pandemic — COVID has truly changed the world forever,” says Smith. “We’ve observed how emergency approaches taken in the early months of the pandemic have become system-wide solutions that are fully integrated into medical practices today.”
“Healthcare is a sector that is slow to change. The pandemic has been an accelerant: Changes that would have taken years took weeks. Medical practice is going digital, intelligent, and has to go global to work, as the pandemic has shown. An outbreak in one place can be an outbreak everywhere. As human resources don’t exist to meet that demand, technology is the only way to scale and reach people,” Smith says. “The stethoscope is the icon of medicine. When I designed the Thinklabs One, I knew it didn’t look anything like the old icon. That is now a metaphor for all of healthcare — it will not look the same going forward.”
About Thinklabs
Thinklabs was founded in 1991 by Clive Smith, a pioneering electronic stethoscope designer. Applying unique approaches to circuit design he learned at Caltech, Smith invented a proprietary method for sensing the vibration of a stethoscope diaphragm, setting a new standard for stethoscope acoustic performance.
The Thinklabs One marked a paradigm shift in stethoscope form and function — a bold move to eliminate the hollow tube styling that predates the American Civil War. This new form immediately took its place in the armamentarium used to fight Ebola, telemedicine and other novel applications. Its functional performance has earned the Thinklabs One more than 300 references in peer-reviewed journal papers authored by researchers around the world.
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SOURCE Thinklabs One
