Longevity Is The Future If We Tackle Digital Health First

Why don’t we deal with longevity at The Medical Futurist? A substantial amount of our followers have asked the question and requested us to cover related topics. I have even received questions about it during events and live Q&As. 

After all, at The Medical Futurist we deal with topics about the latest healthcare trends and technologies that parallel science-fiction, and prolonging one’s life is at the core of sci-fi culture. Even Mary Shelley’s iconic Frankenstein, which is often credited as the world’s first science fiction novel, dealt with similar themes by imagining life evolving past its natural course.

However, even though a lot of intellectual and financial resources are invested in the field of longevity, we are far from facing related matters.

At the time being, I think that we need to focus on the practical things that define the issues of today. To put it in focus: how can I talk about longevity when I cannot even download my medical records from a healthcare institution?! How can you improve your current healthcare status if you don’t become more proactive in managing your health? How can policymakers handle issues around data that deal with life and death when they don’t understand how Big Tech operates?

Source: www.longevitynetwork.org

These are issues that we have to address now before we have no control over them in the near future. But don’t get me wrong, I believe that we will turn ageing into a standalone condition rather than an eventuality. We will have treatments to specifically target this ailment and extend our lifespan, especially years spent in good health. It's not just a research question (when they find such treatments) but also a sociological one, because extending our lifespan starts with digital health.

Join us as we look at some of those issues we must tackled before turning our attention to longevity issues. But before, let’s peek at progress in the latter field.

The maturing of the life-extension field

Living for longer and healthily so (think feeling like you’re in your 40s when you are 238 years old) is, understandably, an enticing prospect for many. You will live long enough to visit or move to other planets just like you travel to other countries; you could play football with your great-great-great-grandchildren; and architecture enthusiasts might even see the Time Pyramid to completion. 

Even if the American Board of Medical Specialties neither recognises the anti-ageing field as a specialty (yet) nor the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine’s professional standing, some of the brightest contemporary scientists like Aubrey de Grey and Craig Venter are driving progress in the longevity field to make such possibilities a reality by making life extension a focused field of science. Dr. Aubrey de Grey co-founded the Methuselah Foundation in 2003. The latter funds anti-ageing research and has as strategic goal: "Making 90 the New 50 by 2030." Dr. de Grey also helped set up the SENS Research Foundation in 2009 that funds and conducts research in longevity. Craig Venter, of the human genome sequencing fame, founded Human Longevity Inc. in 2014. The company is dedicated to scientific research exploring the potential for longer, healthier human lifespans.

Such endeavours also attracted startups, Big Tech companies and major players from academia into the field of longevity. Founded in 2013, the secretive, Google-backed Calico focuses on anti-ageing research. Stanford University has its own Center on Longevity; while Harvard researchers previously discovered a protein that could reverse the ageing process in mice. 

In the U.K., Bristol University researchers are investigating robotic muscle implants to slow down the effects of ageing. The American startup NaNotics is developing nanorobots that “mops up” molecules that trigger diseases and ageing from the circulation. For $200,000, you can already have your body cryopreserved at Alcor and “pause the dying process” until future technology can bring you back in good health.

While not all of these ventures might help cure aging, the growing interest and investment in tackling this issue shows that we are on the path to do so. In fact, Aubrey de Grey believes that the first person to live to 1000 years old may have already been born.

What we need to tackle first

All things considered, the technologies under investigation for prolonging healthy lifespan - nanotechnology, robotic muscles, cryonics and the like - form a part of disruptive technologies that define digital health. As such, once the technology permits it, longevists will face the same issues, if not more heightened, as we are facing with digital health if these aren’t already addressed.

Those are the issues that we are dealing with at The Medical Futurist to prepare for the digital health era and beyond. Below are the issues we need to tackle first before we contemplate topics around longevity at length.

1. The need for a cultural transformation

The first peer-reviewed paper from The Medical Futurist Institute defined digital health as “the cultural transformation of how disruptive technologies that provide digital and objective data accessible to both caregivers and patients lead to an equal level doctor-patient relationship with shared decision-making and the democratisation of care.” 

The cultural transformation aspect is crucial, but often overlooked. Even if the most advanced technologies are available to curb diseases or prolong one’s lifespan, they won’t really have the impact or adoption required to take off if stakeholders across healthcare from patients to policymakers as they aren’t well-versed about the risks and benefits that those technologies entail.

Healthcare professionals and policymakers should contemplate issues arising from emerging technologies in healthcare. This will enable them to better address medical as well as ethical issues that these new tools bring along. They could thus serve as guides, helping patients navigate the waves of new technologies flooding the healthcare landscape.

This is especially the case now that Big Tech companies not traditionally involved in healthcare secure a firm footing in this industry. However, recent developments showed that policymakers have a poor grasp over how tech companies operate. Mark Zuckerberg’s hearing following the Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted this.

Without understanding how tech companies work and handle our data, how will policymakers address issues that arise with companies offering more advanced technologies that deal with life and death?

2. A shift from health IT to digital health

Health IT has become an integral component of most modern clinics. By integrating patient data in electronic health records (EHR), these systems improve over the traditional paper-based records by being scalable, cloud-based and not prone to being misplaced. However, those same EHR and IT systems add to physician burnout, are time-consuming and are prone to cyberattacks. The latter can cripple whole systems like the WannaCry ransomware attack on the NHS; and in extreme cases lead to patient death. This was the case in September 2020 during a ransomware attack on the Duesseldorf University Hospital. Due to re-routing and delayed care during the attack, a patient passed away.

However, health IT and digital health are often wrongly looped together. To demarcate the two, the “Gary rule” helps. It refers to Gary, the IT specialist, who alone can fix health IT issues like outdated antivirus software. However, if an issue that Gary alone cannot fix as it requires the input of more stakeholders such as analysing patient data from wearables and addressing the related technological issues, then it’s a digital health issue.

Contrary to health IT, digital health can lift administrative burden off of or even assist medical professionals; allowing them to dedicate more time to patients. For instance, artificial intelligence can reduce alarm fatigue. Medical robots can reduce cross-infection from highly infectious COVID-19 patients. Without shifting to digital health to make such solutions integral parts of the hospital setting, how will stakeholders in the field adopt technologies and novel therapies that add to longevity?

3. Embrace the patient empowerment movement

With the democratisation of healthcare and access to medical data that digital health technologies offer, patients have more agency than ever before to proactively manage their health. They use wearables to keep track of their fitness activity, to order direct-to-consumer genetic sequencing kits to better understand their risks for ailments and to join online patient communities to have better insights over their ailments.

The ivory tower of medicine has evolved past its hierarchical model that bars access to patients altogether. They demand an active part in the decision-making in matters pertaining to their health and wish to have an equal-level partnership with healthcare professionals. However, there is a traditional reluctance from the latter to embrace the patient empowerment movement.

A study showed how some healthcare institutions give patients “conflicting information about requesting their records and, in many cases, give blatant misinformation or limited information". Earlier this year, Epic, the largest EHR company in the U.S. downplayed the federal government’s effort that would enable easier access to one’s electronic health data. Epic’s CEO wrote to hospital administrators, nudging them to disapprove of the proposed rules. Giving patients access to their data should be an imperative rather than a roadblock. They can better know what information clinics have about them and even cross-check for any errors.

If major players aren’t supportive of such demands from patients, then the latter will create or turn to alternative solutions. One example is Hugo Health, which connects patients with their medical data and only moves data with their permission. Regulatory authorities could support such efforts to better guide patients as to where to turn to; rather than have them adopt unregulated third parties. 

If at present we cannot access our medical data freely to make informed decisions in a secured and regulated landscape, will we be able to do so in the future to better assess which therapies and technologies are better suited to improve our healthy years?

Until we address longevity issues

While we have only described three issues that we have to address now, there are many more in practice. These need to be contemplated to prepare us for the adoption of advanced technologies, some of which could help prolong our lifespan. From privacy concerns to Big Tech’s influence in healthcare, such issues are our focus at The Medical Futurist. We will continue to do so to prepare every stakeholder in the healthcare spectrum. 

By tackling these, the healthcare sector will be better equipped to manage future technologies and the dilemmas they bring along. We invite you to keep in touch with our analyses on relevant topics on our website to better prepare yourself.

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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