BioTEC 2018: A recap of the lessons learned about how to improve the healthcare system.
November 17th, 2018 — The doors to the QNC building at the University of Waterloo opened for the arrival of delegates to the Biotechnology & Bioengineering Conference (UW BioTEC 2018). As a Biotechnology/ Economics student, I registered to attend this event based on a recommendation from a dear friend. Having previously interned at a health-tech startup, I was looking forward to hearing about the progress of technology innovation in the healthcare industry, especially AI, from the variety of key professionals speaking at the conference.
Here are three key lessons that I have drawn from the conference:
1. There’s a dire need for standardized life-science datasets to advance technology innovation in healthcare.
At BioTEC 2018, the importance of data in enabling better medical outcomes and technology innovations was a frequently-visited theme. From Cameron Piron’s work to improve imaging data quality for surgeons to Teyden Nguyen’s research using genomic data, the use of big data to gain insights is an integral part of the healthcare industry. Not only would data provide insights, but it is also the input necessary to train Artificial Intelligence that would assist doctors and researchers in more complex issues such as cancer diagnosis.
However, data, like any natural resources, need to be refined before it can bring any values to us.
One of the challenges with life-science data is that it is usually not perfectly standardized. As a result, researchers like Teyden Nguyen had to perform significant data reformatting work to obtain usable data for her programs. These tasks are usually time-consuming and can take away a lot of time from the researchers.
Another major challenge with life-science data is biasedness. During the AI in Medicine panel, many panelists drew the anecdote of Watson IBM’s to illustrate the consequence of bias data. Despite being marketed for being able to provide cancer therapy recommendations, many doctors have flagged the AI technology for giving ‘unsafe and incorrect recommendations’. The issue stemmed from the data being biased towards hypothetical scenarios rather than represent real patient conditions.
Hence, it begs the question “Could we have an institution responsible for standardizing and managing datasets to make sure they are usable and unbiased?” According to the panel, it is definitely not a technically-impossible problem, but rather there isn’t enough funding or financial incentive for any entity to take on this task.
Perhaps this is an unfulfilled gap that could contribute significantly to technological development in healthcare?
2. Medical technology must always be designed with consideration for the doctor’s experience.
During Cameron Piron’s keynote, he demonstrated how his company’s imaging devices are designed to provide better ergonomic support for surgeons. This story got me thinking about the importance of considering the doctor’s experience in adopting technology to healthcare.
With digital transformation happening at scale in the healthcare industry, we expect that doctors will have more tools at their disposal to serve patient better. However, in a report by UC Riverside, doctors are spending less time with patients and experience fatigue due to having to spend more time maintaining EHR (Electronic Health Records). Despite providing a better mean to maintain patients’ data, the EHR inadvertently limited doctors from their main role of providing care for patients.
The question of doctor’s experience with technology is becoming more important than ever before especially in the advent of Artificial Intelligence. Assuming that we created an AI that could accurately diagnose cancer 100%, does that mean doctors no longer have a role in the process of improving patients’ health outcome?
During the AI in Medicine panel, Dr. Sunit Das suggested that while we can train AI to take over tasks such as diagnosing cancer, we can’t train AI to replace the doctor-patient relationship. We often focus on measurable metrics such as accuracy of diagnosis that we forget that the presence of doctors provides necessary human-to-human interactions for patients.
Successful health outcomes is not simply a matter of giving the correct treatment, but it is also about reshaping the way that a human lives. Hence, the role of doctors in the healthcare system is never going to go away, as their human capability coupled with medical expertise will always be needed.
Therefore, the real opportunity in healthcare is to design technology that empowered doctors to not only make better medical decisions but enhance their ability to build relationships with their patients.
3. The healthcare system must strive to incentivise meaningful impact for patients rather than volume.
During the Industry panel, one of the panelists, Lahav Gil, shared an interesting opening statement: “Everybody should be driven by meaning”.
As the panel discussion continued, Lahav’s word begins to bear more context, as the audience could recognize the motivation that drives each panelist to pursue their respective career in healthcare. Lane Desborough’s motivation stood out to me, as he co-founded Bigfoot Biomedical from his wish to fight Type 1 diabetes, a disease his own children was diagnosed with. It was clear that his motivation was to focus on helping diabetics achieve better life outcomes, rather than any economic incentives.
The healthcare industry is a complicated one layered with multiple stakeholders in every decision. While the patients demand better treatment, they aren’t the deciders of what they’ll get. Instead, a patient’s outcome can be dependent on what the insurer thinks, what the hospital institution think and what the doctors think. As a result, the adoption of medical technology is not decided by the patients, but it’s up to what investors, regulators, hospitals and many other stakeholders. Hence, entrepreneurs in the healthcare industry would often have to deal with the constraints derived from various stakeholders.
As a result, while Canada provides universal-healthcare for every citizen, its focus is to maximize the volume of health services it produces, rather than innovate better healthcare solutions. Hence, entrepreneurs would find opportunities limited in the Canadian market.
On the other hand, the U.S.’s privatization of healthcare means there’re more incentives for innovating better medical solutions. However, this also means that healthcare is a lot more costly there, and sometimes cannot be afforded by patients who need them.
In healthcare, there’s always an ongoing trade-off in whether funds should be allocated to innovate better healthcare solutions or ensuring that the volume is met. Unlike other industry, there’s a critical demand for healthcare solutions to provide the intended outcome for patients without subjecting them to unnecessary side effects. Hence, the challenge of scaling a solution in healthcare is more difficult than anywhere else.
Ultimately, improving patients’ health outcome is the motivation for any entrepreneur in the healthcare industry.
Final thoughts
UW BioTEC 2018 was a more enriched learning experience that I had anticipated. Prior to the conference, I had my skepticism about how healthcare could adopt technological innovations, given its complexity and long regulatory processes. However, having gained insights on the needs for better data, the importance of designing for doctors and the motivation of industry leaders give me much optimism on the future in this field.
