By Daniel Kraft, M.D., who is a Stanford and Harvard-trained
physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and innovator. He is
currently Executive Director of FutureMed, Medicine
Track Chair of Singularity
University, Founder and CEO of IntelliMedicine,
and Scientific Advisory Board member for the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE.
It sometimes seems that the world is speeding up, and it’s often hard
to remember how quickly things are changing in our everyday lives. The
relatively slow, expensive technologies of the 1970s and 80s are now
essentially ‘free’ features that have dissolved into our exponentially
more powerful devices. GPS with navigation directions, video and still
cameras, online encyclopedias and the like would have separately cost
over $500K 20-30 years ago. As inventor, futurist and Singularity
University co-founder Ray Kurzweil likes to point out, a kid in
Africa with a smartphone today has more access to information than the
U.S. president did 15 years ago.
I recently found (via Twitter) this delightful and insightful
story about a couple, both born in 1986, who have two young
children. The couple, inspired by their son’s propensity to play on an
iPad instead of outside on a nice day, have chosen to revert their life
to 1986 levels of technology. No cell phones, no Google, no email, no
tweets, no SMS.… So now they read books, develop rolls of film, and look
things up in Encyclopedia Britannica. Watching this family, we might
wonder how we got through the day and communicated and coordinated with
our friends and family. But we don’t need to go back 27 years; even the
changes in the last decade have been breathtaking, and have disrupted
many businesses and ways of life (for better or worse). When was the
last time you went to a travel agent, visited a physical bank, drove to
pick up a VHS or DVD rental?
While much of our world has changed, many elements of our healthcare
system seem stuck in the 1980s or before. Most important medical
information is sent by FAX machine. Data is often siloed between clinics
and hospitals down the street from each other. Blood pressures and
blood glucose values are scribbled down in notebooks and rarely if it
all shared with the patient’s clinicians. Appointments are often
difficulty to obtain, and sourced through multiple choice phone
systems. And hard to decipher prescriptions are hand carried to
pharmacies. Waiting rooms are still, well, waiting rooms, replete with
old magazines and #2 pencil forms asking the same questions about
allergies and addresses to be filled out ad infinitum.
But all of this – how we define and experience healthcare and the
practice of medicine – is on the cusp of major change. In a decade from
now it will look as quaint as the family living with 1986 technology.
Indeed, this year, Electronic Medical Records finally surpassed
the 50% mark in hospitals and many clinics…. Increasingly,
physicians are able to email their patients, which can often help avoid
problems or clarify treatment paths…. Walk into an Apple Store or a
Best Buy and you will find 25+ ‘connected health’ type devices, which
can measure everything from how many steps you take and stairs you climb
to your weight, blood pressure, and even blood sugar and posture….
Smart phones (especially with the new
capabilities in the iPhone 5S) are the supercomputers in our
pockets (or increasingly on
our wrists) with a billion times the performance/price ratio of an
early 1970s machine. Smart mobile devices are increasingly becoming a
dashboard for our health, whether that means tracking our exercise,
diet, or medicine compliance, or phone
cases that can capture and transmit your critical bio-data.
At FutureMed,
a program I run out of Singularity University, we look at the
trajectory of fast-moving technologies and how they can be leveraged,
especially at their convergence to improve health and medicine. Health
data companies like those vying for the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE
have emerged out of FutureMed, and are creating connected, smart and
networked devices that will change how we manage home diagnosis, triage,
and communications with our clinicians. Smart, cheaper and
point-of-care sensors, such as those being developed for the Nokia Sensing Challenge
Xprize, will further enable the ‘Digital Checkup’ from anywhere. The
world of ‘Quantified Self’ and ‘Quantified Health’ will lead to a new
generation of wearable technologies partnered with Artificial
Intelligence that will help decipher and make this information
actionable.
And this ‘actionability’ is key. We hear the term Big Data used in
various contexts; when applied to health information it will likely be
the smart integration of massive data sets from the ‘Internet of things’
with the small data about your activity, mood, and other information.
When properly filtered, this data set can give insights on a macro level
– population health – and micro – ‘OnStar for the Body’
with a personalized ‘check engine light’ to help identify individual
problems before they further develop into expensive, difficult-to-treat
or fatal conditions.
Bringing these disparate, fast-moving and often convergent
technologies together to reshape the future of healthcare certainly has
challenges, not the least of which are those from the regulatory and
reimbursement worlds. But with some imagination and the desire to
address challenges with many of the seemingly magical technologies
increasingly at our disposal, we have the opportunity to dramatically
shift healthcare from the VHS tape era into the 21st century.
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