Health care of the future — four things that will change everything
Every day we hear about progress in medicine, yet around us, we witness only slight improvements in general public health. Almost everyone who reads this knows at least one person who died of cancer, stroke, heart attack, or modern diseases. It has become so common that we accepted it as a way of life. We can get treatment for any of these serious diseases, but for each health problem we keep under control, we create a bunch of new issues. Curing it completely is not something we see every day. Usually, it involves a cocktail of drugs to keep us healthy to some degree, and a lot of these prescription drugs, due to the high complexity of the human body, usually mess up something else in our system.
So what chance do we have?
Our planet is getting destroyed, our food has fewer nutrients, our water is increasingly polluted; how can we keep our good health in this environment? Are we destined to keep drinking cocktails that big pharma corporations create just to keep us barely alive? Thankfully, like any quantum leap that happened in the history of humankind, technology is the one that can save us. Along with technology, we need to turn our approach upside down and be prepared to let go of the misconceptions we have about health.
1. Personalization of health
First, to understand what healthy looks like, we have to benchmark it. Today we have a minimum benchmark of what the healthy person looks. We know that there is a certain range of blood test results that are considered healthy, we know how urine and stool samples should be, but this is a very limited view. To keep our health in check, we need to personalize the approach and benchmark individual health. Generalizing results is like testing different types of cars with the same tests and expecting the same results. We cannot put Ferrari and Lada under the same test and hope to set the same diagnosis. We need to create our benchmark, know what healthy means for us, our performance, and our capabilities?
How will technology help?
We see new devices that can monitor our health and perform tests that used to be done only in the laboratory. We have smart watches, blood pressure monitors, diabetes devices. We can track our blood pressure, sleep pattern, breathing, brain activity, and dozens of vital signs. But those devices are still bulky and disconnected. Currently, most home healthcare systems provide a single test result. In the future, these tests will become more user friendly, and results will be displayed in an easy to understand manner for the home user. The interface would in all likelihood be more graphical and provide easier to read results — imagine results displayed with smileys; happy — good, neutral-take care, red-take action. Consumers have become used to having data at their fingertips, and apps that combine test results and ‘wearables’ that automatically provide data to these apps are recent trends. Once we have all the possible data tracked, we can say that we have a benchmark of our health, what good looks like to us.
2. Integrated testing
Today, the most health-conscious people are doing general health checkups once a year, do some blood tests, get the abdominal ultrasound, and even make you do some physical exercises to test your performance, but that’s it, once a year. Do you know that your blood test can vary immensely in the morning from the afternoon, or whether you have eaten something healthy the day before or had some unhealthy snacks? Even if you only got the highly seasoned potato chips the night before, it can increase your cholesterol and LDL results. What happens then; the doctor puts you on a low-fat diet, and you think you got it covered. To see what is going on, to know what affects your blood, urine, hormones, and body pH, you would need to test every day, even a couple of times a day. Unless you are lying in the hospital with wires and tubes attached to you, there is no way you would be able to do that today, not to mention how expensive those tests would be.
How will technology help?
We have a lot of home diagnostic devices already available today, but they are still cumbersome. To get the complete picture, you would need to spend an hour going through all the different devices and tests. To test often, those diagnostic devices have to be invisible. They have to integrate into the things we use naturally. A good example is our smartwatch, it was something we were already using, but now it can track our steps, heartbeats, VO2max, ECG, sleep, even blood pressure. We will soon have integrated diagnostic devices into our toilet, toothbrush, bad, chair, mobile phone, glasses. All of this will have some kind of diagnostic device that will track our data and send them to the health platform for further analysis and integration of all those collected data.
3. Improved diagnosis
To improve our chance of surviving any severe condition, the essential thing that needs to happen is we need to get diagnoses early. For example, if we recognize cancer early, it becomes barely a nuisance than a severe disease. You get it removed, do a regular checkup, and that’s it. Heart attack, stroke, you improve your chances thousandfold if you can recognize it right away and get to the hospital in time.
How will technology help?
Once we have all the data combined, it is easy to correlate them to similar conditions. In the beginning, they will just reroute the information to your health care provider for them to check the results. After a while, once they have enough data and the reliability of those devices increases, they will immediately give you the diagnosis. They will instruct you with the next best action to take to mitigate the consequences, whether it is to call 911 or to schedule a doctor’s visit in the next month or so for less severe conditions.
4. Improved prediction
Usually, severe conditions arise from small changes we make in our lives that become a habit. Getting coffee first thing in the morning, having something sweet after each meal, enjoying wine and cigar regularly, things like that can add to some severe consequences. For example, getting coffee in the morning is not a problem for most people. But you could have a very sensitive layering of your stomach, which could get irritated by coffee; after a while, you could get an ulcer that could, many years down the road, turn to cancer. Now, who could predict that? For most people, chances are slim to none, but if you don’t have a personalized approach and prediction, you could never know that for you, this could be fatal.
How will technology help?
AI is the one thing that will turn the game completely. Machine learning is a subset of AI. Even though it sounds complex, it is nothing more than the advanced statistical approach that crunches massive amounts of data and finds connections and patterns not visible to the human eye. It can recognize patterns in a large amount of data that no doctor could ever realize. It can understand, so-called butterfly effect in your health. We see it already today outperforming doctors in early diagnosis. According to researchers from Google Health and Imperial College London, who designed and trained a computer model on X-ray images from nearly 29,000 women, the algorithm outperformed six radiologists in reading mammograms.
In the future, AI will be responsible for setting up early diagnoses that are still not visible to doctors, but more than that, it will warn you what could happen down the road. The beauty of crunching large amounts of data is that you could find connections between completely unrelated things. Let’s say that you have iron deficiency and asthma; it can correlate based on historical data that people usually get higher heart rate and blood pressure. Adjusting your eating habits or even getting more iron could separate you from being completely healthy or drinking a cup of pills.
So if we start to monitor our health, diagnose early and use AI to improve prediction, diseases like cancer would become just like a common cold, something you would treat in the comfort of your home or local doctor’s office.
