What could the future of healthcare look like in 2021, 2025 or even 2050?

What could the future of healthcare look like in 2021, 2025 or even 2050? This was the overarching question explored in detail this week during The Economist’s virtual Future of Healthcare Week Asia.

It is also a question I, along with many of my colleagues, have been dedicated to exploring for a while now – but amid the current pandemic – feels more pressing than ever before.

Making healthcare personal

I had the opportunity to join two sessions – the first a fireside chat with Prof. Tikki Pangestu, visiting professor, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore and former director in research policy & cooperation department, World Health Organization. We had a very engaging discussion about the readiness of APAC countries to deliver personalised healthcare (PHC). What emerged strongly was the importance of health systems being open to adopting digital solutions and big data, and the need to implement policies that facilitate this – such as better guidelines for using real-world data, and the need for more rigorous and consistent data collection.

The second session I joined was an expert panel discussion on taking precision medicine mainstream between Dr Jeremy Lim, Director, global health, Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Chien-Jen Chen, Former Vice President of Taiwan, Mahesh Pratapneni, Founder and managing partner, Emerge Ventures and executive director, MedGenome, and Patrick Tan, Executive Director, Genome Institute of Singapore and Professor, Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Programme, Duke-NUS Medical School, and myself. I loved listening to the examples of how Taiwan is already adopting personalised healthcare to improve detection and treatment for patients with Hepatitis C, and how genomics programmes in India are helping address biases that exist within current genomic sequencing. To no surprise, building and maintaining trust in new technologies as well as protection and uses of data came up again and again. I also highlighted the crucial need for policies that facilitate greater interoperability of data, as insights indicate that scalability of data remains an issue across our region.

A path forward

During the course of our discussion, Prof. Tikki stated ‘whatever gets measured, gets done’. And he’s right. To realise a more personalised healthcare future in APAC, we need a clear picture of where we are now. That is why we are developing the APAC Personalised Health Index in partnership with healthcare and policy experts from across Asia – including Professor Tikki and Dr Lim.

Launching in January, the Index is a first-of-its-kind online policy tool that will provide insights and recommendations on how countries across Asia are tracking in adopting personalised healthcare and highlighting areas of opportunity to evolve and improve.

So, what will the future of healthcare look like? For me, the answer is realising the promise of personalised healthcare for all patients. I sincerely believe achieving it is a reality in our lifetime if we can bring together the technology, frameworks, policies and data to ensure our future healthcare systems deliver the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.

Like Hippocrates famously said: It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than what sort of disease a person has!