A Christmas tree of exciting 2022 events and 2023 promises

2022 has offered quite a bit in the domain of Healthcare.

Techno-optimism versus the raw reality that for patients, almost nothing has changed. Fragmentation all over the place. A disjointed maze for their care providers. Their days are spent navigating antiquated, separate systems for scheduling, patient records, insurance approvals, and more. A disconnection of systems that is the source of frustration for both sides. Please read Oliver Kharraz’ great piece for Forbes on this issue here.

Also, no less than half of all people in the world lack access to basic medical care. “We’ve already built the Ferrari” of health care. What’s missing is the road”, a razor sharp quote by Kenyan humanitarian activist Umra Omar on the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in May. More on this in ‘The future of health care is here. When will it be everywhere?’ by Pratap Khedkar for STAT here.

While innovations rightfully grab the headlines, these advances won’t benefit the millions of people who need them without collective action to deliver them at scale. The question is, how will that be done?

Enter techno-optimism.

Techno-optimism which makes many of us believe - me included - the biggest company ever … is yet to be formed. Daisy Wolf and Vijay Pande from power VC Andreesen Horowitz bet the future’s biggest company, the consumer health giant, won’t be one of today’s big tech or incumbent healthcare companies. It will be a consumer-obsessed, healthcare-native tech company that reimagines what care can look like. Please read their great piece here.

The north star example is easy to define. Every country has 10 digital health plays developing 10 versions of the 10 kinds of functions patients resolve using digital health tools. But there is only one Waze to resolve my traffic issues. Or one Ticketmaster to get me tickets to the opera. A unicorn to be born. Will we start to crack that code in the years to come?

I think so. Watch Pixar’s Big Hero 6 again. Meet Baymax again. A big marshmallow inflatable doctor who appears as my twin out of a little box.?How does he look like in 2023? Now that digital humans, avatars, enter the realm of our world. Created by text to image and text to video tools.

Indeed, we’ve seen plenty of new AI systems that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language (Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL-E2). In 2023 we’ll see real applications for novel drug development. Watch players like Generate Biomedicines.

ChatGPT became omnipresent end of the year. Expect 2023 to deliver novel, medically relevant datasets to train this. Multiple opportunities – for hospitals, payers, insurance companies,… to become the provider of proprietary data sources. See already PubMed GPT, dealing with biomedical data, as a flavour for things to come.

While both these technologies create real ‘outcome’, that outcome is not so sure for the Metaverse. Hence the Metaverse a fad or not a fad? I believe 2023 will show us first real examples of Metaverse applications

– Solving a real problem or problems

– Inspiring new thinking

– Enabling new ways of working

We have at least launched our Healthskouts Educational Center in the metaverse to explore with you how we can turn that famous Benjamin Franklin quote (tell-teach-experience) in practice. Thank you Mieke Donders to be the master here and to design this:

As (Health)skouts for novel technology we published a few posts seemingly as a first, leading to exciting meetings with some of the GAMAM plays.

Most read were

a)????the announcement by Google that data from Fitbit (which they acquired in 2021) can now be integrated in the medical record. Hence my doctor can see, trust and use them in lifestyle management (see further).

b)????a novel continuous blood pressure sensor not requiring calibration from LiveMetric

c)????a toilet extension to assess urine for biomarkers from Olive Diagnostics

d)????a Parkinsons App from h2o Therapeutics connected to the AppleWatch to monitor patients at home

Next to a lot of work – BIG shoutout to Frank Boermeester - on the promise of use of Platforms in healthcare,?the future of imaging, new ways to develop digital therapeutics (DTx), … but also patient journeys in lung cancer and CAR-T. ?

In order to make digital tools and processes user friendly, gamification will increasingly become a thing in healthcare. Expect next generation Digital Therapeutics (DTx) serving this big time. Like MedRhytms shoe sensor which measures gait and pumps-up the Spotify volume if an MS patient is about to freeze.

More gamified thinking to expect from the creators of Pokemon too, now with a kind of Tamagotchi fusion: Peridot. And from designers, rethinking a scary scanner in the hospital into a signpost of joy. It’s the yellow one.

Relevant, as we start to understand how physical exercise really keeps us healthy, how strong muscles keep your brain healthy. After a 60-minute walk in nature, activity in brain regions involved in stress processing decreases. Or more, how this makes us more creative once we get older.

Therefore, we still expect to celebrate the most promising 30 under 30, or 40 under 40 (incidentally 2 of my friends ticked that list), but as of next year also the 70 over 70.

In order to get there, we need to get preventive care right. This went for a big deal underreported, but is in my opinion extremely important. The National Institutes of Health's?All of Us?Research Program has begun returning personalized health-related DNA results to more than 155,000 participants, with reports detailing whether participants have an increased risk for specific health conditions and how their body might process certain medications. This marks a major milestone for the program, delivering on its promise to share information and return value to participants.

With more to come in 2023 this will allow us to predict roughly 20% of the factors which predispose us to getting sick during our lifetime. That’s not insignificant.

From the health data front, while almost unnoticed, the first examples of using Personal Online Datastores (PODs), using Solid, a new iteration of the internet. Solid is a specification that lets people store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. Pods are like secure personal web servers for data. When data - like the above genomics data - is stored in someone's Pod, they control which people and applications can access it. In 2023 we’ll witness how Flanders, my turf, will launch We Are, the first citizen-centric health data platform using the same technology. It will become the foundation for providing our citizens their personal digital twin. The creature, like Baymax who will serve (as) my doctor to keep me healthy. Or maybe my friends who’ll start to serve that role.

And finally, as a side: What is true? What can we trust? On purpose not on LinkedIn, but on Instagram, a social medium I hardly use, I posted this.

“The word is out. NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration has selected me as the eldest astronaut to join one of their #spaceship missions in 2025. We’ll test which #digitalhealth tools can be helpful for future missions to manage and eventually save lives. If you want to be considered, drop me a little note ??#remotemonitoring #telehealth #healthtech”

At least 20% of readers congratulated me. BTW the photo is made by the Lensa App.

The privilege of a healthcare futurist. Who realises he cannot predict the future. But using a methodology of ‘Delight thinking’ can help you co-create the future. I look forward to do that with you again in 2023.