Digital healthcare opportunities and challenges

The healthcare sector, like every other, is being transformed through a host of new technologies and the opportunities that these technologies facilitate. In some ways, this is an old discussion, new technologies have always changed how we manage our health, both at a personal, and at a social, level. What appears to happening now is that several technologies are starting to emerge in the sector that have the potential to redefine the fundamental relationships in the industry. This disruption will, as it unfolds, produce both risks and opportunities. While it is at its early stages, it is worthwhile starting to analyse what is happening and how we can take advantage of the opportunities as they present themselves. The main challenge for the sector revolves around the management and use of data about people's health, habits and lifestyle.

The technology trends that are creating this challenge are:

• Virtualization of patient data in digital systems allows for portability of the data and increased use of that data
• Artificial intelligence, which has the potential to transform diagnosis and treatment through its application to digital data
• Internet of Things, which could expand the ability to monitor and measure patients in all aspects of their lives
• Blockchain, could serve as a way to create trusted relationships around data and improve the ability of patients to manage how their data is used.

Changing relationships in digital healthcare

These technology changes are already starting to create new relationships among the various groups involved in healthcare, particularly patients, caregivers, regulators and technology companies. As a result, there is:

• Increased access to medical knowledge by a large segment of population, which leads to more self-management and a challenge of professionals
• Access to more personal and aggregate data by everyone: patients, healthcare professionals and technology companies
• Increasing inequalities in access to, and control over, this data

Digital healthcare opportunities

In this landscape, there are a number of opportunities not only to take advantage of the increase in digital data, but also to address the challenges that come from the abundance and portability of sensitive patient data.

Using data

Technology companies, doctors and researchers have begun exploring the possibilities of this 'Big Data'. Generally, this exploration has been around:

• Integrating data from a range of sources, along with environmental data to create a holistic, in-depth profile of the patient’s health
• Integrating artificial intelligence and human expertise to facilitate the use of this data for prevention, diagnosis and treatment
• Aggregating this data in order to understand and monitor public health trends and threats

This is still a new field and there are opportunities here particularly around how to integrate a person's data from a host of different sources. For example, how to bring data from fitness monitoring devices, like Fitbit, into traditional patient data collected by doctors and hospitals to create a more complete picture of the person's health.

Governing data

As we collect data from more sources about people and their health and are able to integrate that data into a single view of the person, the challenge will be how to balance the benefits this provides with an ethical treatment of the person who the source of this data. The challenge has two, related aspects:

• Who controls the data about a person and, therefore, derives benefit from that data? Specifically, is the data used to improve health, to create opportunities to sell or to discriminate against certain behaviours or people more effectively?
• What is the balance between common and private good? Is it more important that all aspects of a person's data be available in order to improve diagnosis and treatment or are there some aspects of life that remain private, off-limits to the rest of the world?

While this requires a much larger political and philosophical discussion, on the technology level, there are a number of projects and start ups looking at how blockchain technologies might be able to address trust in healthcare data. If these projects are successful, they could address the problem of how to aggregate data and provide people with a means for controlling access to their personal data.

Summary

In this brief overview of digital healthcare, we have looked at how a number of new technologies have come together with the potential to transform how we manage our health on a personal and social level. While it is still early days in this transformation, there is the potential to collect and use vast amounts of data about all aspects of a person's life and environment. There are many potential uses of this data and there need to be decisions about who has control over that data and for what uses. These ethical and political concerns can be supported or hindered by technology. In this moment, we have the possibility to shape the direction of digital healthcare and our relationship to technology if we are attentive.