One area of the market which I'm particularly bullish on in the long-term is the healthcare sector.
Due to factors including increased chronic disease burden, population growth, ageing populations, and better treatments, I expect demand for healthcare products and services will grow strongly over the next couple of decades.
With that in mind, here are three top healthcare shares that I would buy today:
CSL Limited (ASX: CSL)
If you only have room for one healthcare share in your portfolio I would make it CSL. Although the global biotech company's shares have risen strongly over the last 12 months, I believe this has been more than deserved after its blockbuster first-half result and guidance for the full-year. This year CSL expects to achieve net profit after tax in the range of US$1,680 and US$1,710 million. Which will be growth of almost 28% year-on-year at the top end of its guidance. As well as a strong performance from its core business, the emergence of its Seqirus influenza business was a key highlight and source of growth during the half. I expect more of the same in the second-half and the foreseeable future.
Pro Medicus Limited (ASX: PME)
Pro Medicus is a healthcare technology company that I think has a bright future ahead of it. The main attraction to the company for me is its increasingly popular Visage 7. This impressive piece of software provides radiologists and referring physicians with fast server-side rendered images streamed via an intelligent thin-client viewer. This allows its users to have a customised protocol-driven workflow to natively view multi-dimensional imagery and a patient's complete imaging history. It will come as no surprise to learn that some highly respected healthcare institutions in the U.S. have signed multi-year agreements for the software in the last 12 months.
Volpara Health Technologies Ltd (ASX: VHT)
Another up and coming healthcare technology company is Volpara Health Technologies. The New Zealand-based company specialises in breast imaging analytics and analysis software. Its software is regulatory cleared (FDA, CE, TGA), patent protected, clinically validated, used in 36 countries, and has over 273 supporting science publications. On Thursday the company advised that its market share has grown to 3.7% in the United States and reiterated its target of a 9% share by the end of FY 2019. It if achieves this it is likely to lead to another significant jump in its annualised recurring revenues. In FY 2018 they rose an impressive 223%.
