A New Day, Part 6 of 6

The leading players in healthcare think and operate on a big scale, with large numbers of people. They have to. Any new therapy, intervention or procedure has to show that it is effective not just for a few individuals, but for many thousands. As the pandemic has shown, health care facilities have to be capable of scaling up their systems to care for thousands of patients. The hot discipline of the moment, epidemiology, looks at health conditions across whole groups of people to identify the distribution and determinants of health-related states and events in specified populations.?And the healthcare ecosystem that I hope to see emerging will tap into the power of big data and analytics to spot threats early.?

Each individual has some physical health factors, some clinical variables, in common with thousands or even millions of others – factors such as their genetic profile, what they eat and drink, how they spend their working day and how physically active (or inactive) they are. It is these commonalities that enable health care professionals to make diagnoses and to prescribe interventions, therapies and medications. Nevertheless, despite the commonalities, every individual on their own individual life journey will increasingly experience their own distinctive patterns of health and illness. Their clinical variables become more variable over time.

The same is true of psychological factors. We all have beliefs and stories about health that we have learned from others - drinking X helps weight loss, too much Y causes cancer, Z hurts your sleep, etc. These beliefs and stories are learned from family, from friends, from communities of interest, from cultures and from online sources. Every individual has a unique health narrative, containing their own unique combination of narrative elements.

The most effective primary care practitioners know individuals – at least some individuals - well enough to treat each one as an individual, adapting their health care to each individual’s unique combination of health factors, health beliefs and health narratives. However, providing this degree of individualized care demands a lot from practitioners. It costs a lot of time and money. It’s not scalable. And this sort of practitioner-individual relationship develops only when the individual has a condition that needs regular medical attention: it’s reactive, not proactive. It requires the individual to be not just an individual going about their life, but also a patient with health care needs. Absent regular ongoing contact between the practitioner and the patient, at best the practitioner may be able to consult health records to get a sense of the individual. Other health care practitioners may have occasion to deal with individuals as patients, but the primary care practitioner remains the lynchpin – the only one whose role involves dealing with “the whole person”.?

In an emerging integrated healthcare ecosystem driven by Adaptive Health Experiences, it will be possible for individuals to have more ongoing health-related and wellness-related interactions with a broader range of healthcare professionals. The interactions won’t be driven primarily by individuals experiencing illness or health concerns, but by individuals’ own created health and wellness picture. There will still be doctors and some medical interactions that have a familiar “traditional” feel, but they will be supported and contextualized differently.?

When people are ill or need to be treated, they study and rationalize extensively. People in these circumstances are seeking explanations and means to understand and explain experiences sometimes to others. They often do so by telling their own stories and stories shared in this way have powerful emotional value that can help stimulate well-being. In this emerging world, consumers will need tools to create and manage their own health interests and profiles – health goals and narratives that will be used as beacons for products, services and support in the emerging digital health ecosystem and marketplace.??This will fundamentally change their interactions with the healthcare system, create meaningful signals and open them up to a larger ecosystem of players and influencers where relevant products and services can find them, versus the other way around. This is a new kind of dynamic segmentation with shared activation, and in many ways, a whole new kind of health journey.?

In summary, the vision of the Adaptive Health Experience paradigm is to combine the strengths of three disciplines - medicine and pharmaceuticals, technology and innovation, communication and persuasion. It will enable more people to be engage more proactively in the health and wellness journey, to foster shared narratives and activations and to ultimately achieve improved outcomes. It’s going to change the world.?