Healthcare Must Shift From Chance To Choice!

Your life and the lives of your loved ones depend on a massive amount of luck. The Medical Futurist team wants to help you reduce that through the use of digital health technologies. We have launched a comprehensive campaign, From Chance To Choice, for every stakeholder in healthcare who wants to use innovative digital solutions that lead to informed decisions about our health or disease.

The power of taking actions with technology

Hugo Campos, a visual designer and creative director, became famous for his fight to obtain the data generated by his implanted defibrillator. Although his life depends on the device, after he lost his health insurance, the defibrillator’s manufacturer denied him the data. As a Quantified Self-man who wants to measure his health parameters and reduce the risk of contingencies, Campos paid to take a course on cardiac rhythm management and purchased a pacemaker programmer on eBay. That gave him access to the implant, restored his autonomy and right to self–protection, as he himself claimed. Actually, he might be the only pacemaker–defibrillator patient with the ability to interrogate his own implant.

His story is about how to take matters into your hands when it’s about your own health. No matter whether that means going against a company decision trying the almost impossible. In this battle, technology is on our side.

The need to move from chance to choice

Hugo Campos said he managed to “restore his autonomy”, others say he as a patient empowered himself through data and technology. No matter which expression you choose, the crucial point is that he cut out uncontrollable factors from his environment which could have negatively influenced his health. While you don’t have to take a course on cardiac rhythm management to be able to take ownership for your health, with some steps you could reduce the amount of uncertainty and contingency regarding your care.

Do you think you don’t have to? Don't you see how luck could get in the way of your health? Think about it!

If you fall ill, you will receive treatments if you feel a symptom in the right time, gain access to care in due time, get appropriate tests done reliably, your doctor makes the best decision for you based on one of the millions of medical papers out there, and you adhere fully to the therapy. Moreover, environmental effects and lifestyle choices have a massive impact on your quality of life. Can you count how many different parameters determine your patient pathway? Do you know how many can you influence?

We should not accept this. That’s why we launch an international campaign to get From Chance To Choice.

How to reduce luck in healthcare?

The Medical Futurist team wants to help decrease the role of the unforeseen in healthcare through the use of digital health technologies. That’s why we have launched an international, long-term campaign for every stakeholder in healthcare.

No matter whether you’re a patient, a physician, a policy-maker, a researcher, a developer, a techy or a pharma company, we will have practical tools for you about taking matters into your hand to make healthcare more predictable, and as a result more efficient and more preventive.

Ask Me About Digital

As the first step, we launched the "Ask Me About Digital" campaign to facilitate the doctor-patient communication about digital tools.

Nowadays, if someone is diagnosed with an illness or has a symptom, they immediately turn to Google and try to find information online. However, more often than not, patients cannot discuss with their caregivers what they stumbled upon on the web or the data they measured with their health sensors at home, as they don’t know whether physicians are open to it, or they have already had a bad experience. We are eager to change that.

That's why we designed a badge for physicians who are open to discussing websites, apps, health sensors, wearables, etc. We already sent it out to the most enthusiastic GP’s to India, Hungary, and the US. To our utmost pleasure, we already received the first positive stories!

Dr. Zsuzsanna Varga, a primary care physician in Budapest, put the Ask Me About Digital sticker on her door. She said that “a young girl came in the other day, who saw the badge earlier that week, so she was brave enough to come in and show me the pictures she took with her phone on her urticaria that only comes in the morning. The patient also told me about how she googled her symptoms but couldn’t find any reasonable explanation. She was happy about the badge because she has mixed experiences of googling and interpreting it to healthcare practitioners. I think it’s a great possibility to get closer to younger generations because she felt safe and understood, so she won’t be hesitating next time she has any problem”.

If you are a patient and see the badge on the door of your primary care physician, here is what you can expect.

If you want to stick the Ask Me About Digital badge on your door, click here (and here is the PDF to upload based on the description). If you want to get a sticker from us for free, send your postal address (Country, city, zip code, address, name) to [email protected].

To be continued…

Our campaign train will not stop here. We can’t wait to present you our toolkit for physicians, policy-makers, pharma companies and other stakeholders in healthcare. Let’s move together from chance to choice! Join the discussion by using the hashtag #fromchancetochoice on every channel.

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is a keynote speaker and an Amazon Top 100 author.

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