Technology has grown exponentially, but healthcare systems have not kept pace, said Daniel Kraft, executive director, exponential medicine and factory chair, Medicine Singularity University, at the CPBI Forum in New York City. “In many ways, medicine and healthcare is still being practiced like it’s 1846.”
Like the U.S., Canada faces challenges relating to rising costs, an aging population, access to healthcare and variations in clinical practice. The fundamental issue is, our healthcare systems are reactive rather than proactive. “They’re really much more sick-care systems,” Kraft explained.
But technology has the capacity to change all that by bringing healthcare into our homes, our pharmacies and our phones, he added.
Read: Tech innovations underused in Canadian healthcare
More and more apps
Is there an app for that? You bet…today, there’s an app for almost everything. And while they’re not all life-changing inventions, some of them have the potential to positively impact healthcare access and delivery.
For example, Kraft said, there’s an app called pager for urgent care: press a button, and a doctor will visit you at home within three hours. There’s also a prescribable app for diabetes—basically, a glucose meter with a built-in social network. And big pharmacies in the U.S. are building apps allowing you to scan your pill bottle and instantly order a refill.
“The new drug is the empowered patient,” he added.
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Wear me
As sensors become more advanced and our ability to embed them in objects improves, “the Internet of Things is coming to the Internet of the Body,” said Kraft.
It’s all part of what he calls “the quantified self”: using wearables (e.g., the Fitbit or the Apple Watch) to track metrics such as your steps, your sleep and your heart rate. “Like it or not, we’re going to have ways of tracking your health, and that will hopefully lower costs,” he added.
And Kraft sees the idea of wearables moving one step further. “We’re going from wearables to insideables,” he explained. For example, there are pills patients can take to essentially perform the same function as an exploratory surgical procedure, such as an endoscopy.
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Finding the value
In a world of big data, how do we make sense of it all to determine what’s relevant? The challenge is to design interfaces so they’re not overwhelming, said Kraft.
He thinks healthcare data will eventually evolve to be like the modern car: there will be lots of sensors and inputs, but we’ll only focus on the really important ones. “I think we’re moving to a world where we have a GPS for health,” said Kraft.
All of this has significant implications for our ability to change our healthcare systems from a reactive to a proactive model. “I think if we’re smart about it, we can shift our sick-care system into a healthcare system,” he added.