According to EY’s Intelligent Health Ecosystem report, the healthcare industry is on the brink of revolutionary change. In some areas, the future is already accelerating towards us. “There’s an awful lot of health data around at the moment,” says Pamela Spence, global health sciences and wellness industry leader at EY. “But it's growing disproportionately more than ever before.”
In Spence’s view, the future of healthcare lies not in doctors’ waiting rooms. Instead, doctors—or medical engineers, as they could be called—will no longer even need to be in the room; they could oversee multiple patients at a time, remotely from hundreds of miles away. Nanobots, rather than the physician, will deliver the medical interventions to patients. But for that to become a reality, the industry has some streamlining to do to move towards this more integrated, comprehensive virtual model of care.
Here are the major trends, identified by EY, that will enable the healthcare industry from its old, sluggish days of paperwork and pills, to its data-enabled, patient-focused future.
Sensors, everywhere and anywhere, will be the norm
Ingestible sensors. Biometric tattoos. Nanobots. Hand-held genomic sequencers that scan our food for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An explosion in sensors in our homes and on our bodies will produce mountains of valuable data that is constantly being collected—a new and ever-growing Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Doctors will be able to compare each patient’s data to their baseline, or to a larger cohort of datasets. It will mean that diseases can be spotted earlier—or before they even develop. These kinds of interplays between data and actionable insight already happen to a small degree, says Spence—“they’re just not happening at a scale to be meaningful.”
Ultimately, data-led insights will become much more tailored to each and every one of us.
Patient experience will be king
“Unlocking the power of data to drive a personalized health experience is where we see value lying,” says Spence.
And to make that a reality, the future of healthcare will require all (major) participants to opt into an interconnected ecosystem where data is exchanged. As more organizations, stakeholders and individuals partake, the stronger and more effective the insights garnered become. “The power comes in unlocking and combining individuals’ own data, to their own individual ‘baseline’ and also and other relevant (cohorts) of people’s data to determine what treatment and care pathway is right for any specific individual to really drive that personalized health experience,” she says. “On the flip side of that, it won’t work unless organizations, stakeholders and people opt in.”
Other industries, such as retail and entertainment, have long understood that bettering the user experience is where the value lies. In healthcare, the key to encouraging patients to opt in will be to show them the benefits of doing so upfront, says Spence. This becomes even more crucial considering that patient expectations are now higher than ever before. “Once things start to be measured, then people will see the value. And so people will see it as a no-brainer to participate in this wider ecosystem, especially if they are sick.”
And part of that will be allowing patients the autonomy to inspect and probe their own datasets, rather than hiding it away under lock and key. “Organizations really need to think about actually allowing people to interrogate their data with specific questions,” says Spence.
The Intelligent Health Ecosystem is coming
But with the reams of data constantly being collated and stored away, comes the need to find a way to make sense of it. Already, billions of gigabytes of patient data is produced every single year in the healthcare industry. Those mind-boggling numbers are set to continue to grow and multiply, with new sensors being invented and patented all the time. “There’s an explosion in health data, but how much of it is meaningless,” says Spence.
For data to be of true value, we need human-type AI—that is, AI technologies which are capable of sensing, perceiving, learning, reasoning, knowing, planning, and acting. The adoption of this more human-like AI to decipher and analyze patient data will be paramount to scaling up what a physician can actually treat, and, ultimately, will make healthcare more human, unlocking far more actionable insights for patients. Doctors could be trained in AI, big data, and robotics. Companies will need to prioritize personalized data to stay abreast of this new, interconnected health landscape; it will mean sharing and combining datasets between each other. “Armed with much better data and more cognitive rather than computational AI, putting the winning characteristics with platform-based business models—that could serve to define a personalized health experience for all of us,” says Spence.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
