Is This the Future of Medicine? (part 5)

In this fifth part of this series I wanted to review some of what I think are the most interesting and promising technologies and approaches that I have seen lately. As a result, this piece may be more of a curated work, and I hope you may find yourself getting lost in all the links for the items, areas, and tools described.

Topol Rules

I have been a longtime user/subscriber to Medscape and thus a fan of its Editor in Chief, Dr. Eric Topol. But it was coming across his book The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care that placed him squarely on my “watch-list” of the intelligentsia of tech and medicine. I mean this book reads like it was coauthored by Clayton Christensen and Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy.

There’s an App for That

Most recently Topol has published The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands (great title by the way) and this time he covers the internet-of-things as it may happen in our medical futures. Our quantified-selves will be providing information via apps and tools to our smartphones or smart homes.

Big data(bases) will help interpret our signs and symptoms—more quickly, accurately, and dare I say, less expensively—than our current approaches. Resultant treatments will further be tailored to the pharmaceuticals biologically most suitable (I call such meds “pharma-suitables”); again, faster, better, cheaper.

Fantastic Voyage

Bringing a whole new meaning to “Intel Inside,” Topel discusses how sensors injected into bloodstreams (a la Fantastic Voyage) or swallowed, can report back their findings. And at an even smaller scale, there’s DNA-hacking at the molecular level.

Home Remedy

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece that caused me to add an article to my “journal” reading. It was on a variety of currently available tools for home use, from blood-pressure monitoring and EKG recording, to oxygen levels and a “telestation” to respond to wired physicians’ queries.

Rx = EMR + Cloud + EBP + Big Data + Mobile + Social

I co-authored an article on big data and treatment and I have done a great deal of work on the synthetic integration of real-time evidence being available while with a patient via one’s electronic medical record:

Now all this is being further augmented and enhanced via mobile and social aspects as well.

What do the Markets Have to Say?

In looking at 2014 funding in the digital health space, Rock Health found that VCs invested over $4 billion. The top six categories they noted were:

Analytics and Big Data ($393M), Healthcare Consumer Engagement ($323M), Digital Medical Devices ($312M), Telemedicine ($285M), Personalized Medicine ($268M), and Population Health Management ($225M).

It will be interesting to track these areas not only vis-à-vis what develops, but I also wonder will the disrupters become disrupted?

The Uberization of Healthcare

A recent article by Stuart Karten coined the phrase “the Uberization of Healthcare” which is meant to capture all of the above—being disruptive to the orthodoxy, shifting to a customer/patient-centric focus, use of various platforms marshalled to provide services, and even being a little troubling in some ways.

Sharper Pencils Do Not Mean Better Poetry

While I am a big fan what tech can do, I do recognize it is not a plug-and-play panacea. In the late 1980s I was writing and publishing programs I had created in dBase III+ for conducting differential diagnoses of “biological” diagnoses that mimicked psychiatric diagnoses. In my first publications in the areas of clinical outcomes due to such a paucity of data in some areas (30 years ago), there was no evidence-base from which to predicate any reasonable evidence-based practice guidelines or informed decision support tools (let alone technologies).

That was the Cro-Magnon era of computing, sans “the cloud,” neural-networks, strong AI or even citizen internet access. As friend and colleague Monica Oss put it:

We now have lots of relatively inexpensive data from lots of sources – including electronic health record (EHR) data, customer relationship management (CRM) data, financial data, human resources (HR) data, consumer health risk appraisals, and remote monitoring data. In addition, there are many relatively inexpensive tools for analyzing that data. So, it seems that the problem should be solved – right?

Well as you can guess, no. And if this is true for the majority of medical and healthcare providers, imagine the confusion there may be for our patients and their loved ones. So perhaps one of the next evolutions of the gee-whiz tech tools will be intellectually accessible and reasonably understandable provision of results, leading to informed choices, actionable treatments, and successful outcomes. Therein lays the inappropriately named “killer app.”

What do you think about the so-called Uberization of Healthcare? What tech or trends did I miss?

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If you'd like to learn more or connect, please do at https://DrChrisStout.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn, or find my Tweets as well.

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