Zooming out on health

Have you been a patient recently? Did you wonder why you had to repeat the same details to each clinician you met? Whether you’re a patient or a clinician, there’s clearly something weird going on. Online shopping and browsing services have an impressive and interconnected picture of every aspects of our lives, and yet health information is still gathered, stored and analysed in silos that struggle to communicate with each other. Why is that? Shouldn’t it be easier for everyone?

In reality, a hospital is less like a single entity and more akin to an industrial estate - a collection of co-located mini-organisations with discrete information systems and distinct ways of working. And that’s just secondary care. Integrating data from GP, community and hospital care is even more rare. Patients will point to the GP’s computer and say “Well you must know what they did to me in hospital, it’s on your system isn’t it?” Probably not, I’m afraid - is the reply. Why do patients ask this question? Because they know that technological advances have made it possible, if maybe not probable…

Each clinician is peeking through a small letterbox into the health and wellness of the whole individual in front of them. An optician can peer through the pupil of your eye, and your dentist into your mouth, viewing a world of valuable information about your general health and possible pathologies. But how much more valuable would that view be, if it included the context - the gestalt of information garnered from all your clinical interactions? Clinicians are trying to use discrete slices of information to get a picture of the one of most complicated interconnected system we know of. Even worse than the fact they don’t have this information, is that they could have it. Just imagine how much more effective patient consultations would be with the relevant information right there in their notes.

What if we could gather everything from genomic to lifestyle information and all those clinical records into one place, totally under our control, and then grant access when we choose, to whoever we want, to give a holistic picture of our bodies? That sort of system would not only make being a patient less complicated and enable better care for us all but would unlock the faster innovation of new treatments for all.