One of my favourite areas of the market to look for long-term investment opportunities is the healthcare sector.
I believe that growing populations and increasing chronic disease burden will lead to stronger and stronger demand for healthcare services and products over the next couple of decades.
With this in mind, below are three small cap healthcare shares that I believe could have bright futures ahead of them. They are as follows:
Nanosonics Ltd (ASX: NAN)
Nanosonics is an infection control specialist which I think has a long runway for growth. The company's trophon EPR product has been growing its installed base in the U.S. at a strong rate over the last few years thanks to being regarded as best in class and environmentally friendly. The release of a new version may have disrupted its sales slightly in FY 2018, but I believe it has cemented its position as the market leader. This should put it in a strong position to capture a growing share of the market in the coming years.
Pro Medicus Limited (ASX: PME)
Pro Medicus is the healthcare technology company which I believe is well worth taking a closer look at. It is the company behind the popular Visage 7 software, which provides radiologists and referring physicians with fast server-side rendered images streamed via an intelligent thin-client viewer. This allows users to have a customised protocol-driven workflow to natively view multi-dimensional imagery and a patient's complete imaging history. A testament to the quality of the product is the fact that a number of highly respected healthcare institutions in the U.S. have signed multi-year agreements for the software over the last 12 months.
Volpara Health Technologies Ltd (ASX: VHT)
Another fast-growing healthcare company is Volpara Health Technologies. It provides an increasingly popular breast imaging analytics and analysis software. In FY 2018 growing demand for the software led to a significant rise in annual recurring revenues. Based on its strong start to FY 2019, high quality product, and sizeable market opportunity, I expect more of the same this year and beyond from Volpara.
