Healthcare is one of the disciplines that benefits the most from technological innovation.
Renowned practical futurist Michael Rogers claims that IT is well positioned to fundamentally transform “total healthcare delivery.” He expressed this opinion in a podcast on the Healthcare IT News website.
“Health care is one of the disciplines that benefits the most from technological innovation and just in time, because the wheels come off,” M. Rogers drew an analogy with flying cars.
The futurist has identified a number of changes that he sees on the horizon.
First, insurance companies, according to M. Rogers, are de facto becoming regulators of new technologies. It is they who determine in which direction they will develop.
Secondly, wellness memberships will begin to appear in the world, which offer unlimited online consultations of specialists.
In other words, according to the futurist, in the future, medical services will be more and more interconnected, the virtual world will increasingly penetrate into various areas. There will be a kind of vertical relationship between insurance services, pharmaceutical companies/services, medical companies and the wellness industry. At the same time, the goal of such changes is to maximize the quality of services, reducing their cost.
Of course, such large companies as Amazon, Google, Apple set the direction and dictate the level of digital services.
The futurist does not exclude that in the future, instead of insurance, people will buy a “membership” in a certain system, which gives access to various types of services: fitness, general medicine, buying medicines, online consultations, etc.
Combining personal data in one system, including information about purchases of products and supplements, can be useful and used for medical purposes. In particular, this will allow physicians to make the treatment of patients more personalized, reduce the cost of treatment and make it more effective.
Touched M. Rogers and artificial intelligence. He considers it a plus, especially machine learning. After all, they can get data that a person cannot get. But, according to him, the question of the accuracy of the work of artificial intelligence is how the decision on the treatment plan is made, how the algorithms work.
“We need to know how artificial intelligence works,” said M. Rogers.
The question also arises whether unemployment in the medical field will not increase.
The futurist also remembered precision medicine. This is a model of medicine that offers an individualized approach to treatment and settings in the field of healthcare, medical solutions, treatments, products that are selected individually.
The idea of precision medicine – the collection of information about the life factors of each person (place of residence, pollution of the area, nutrition, physical activity, etc.), which will help adjust the treatment and selection of medicines, is more effective than standard tests.
Thus, M. Rogers concludes that everything in medicine will be computerized in terms of data collection in order to simplify the scheme for providing medical services to patients.
Important, in his opinion, is the growing role of social networks in the healthcare system.
Let us explain that today in social networks various groups are created according to interests, diseases, and so on. You can, for example, be added to a group of users with stomach diseases. At the same time, people, exchanging experience in treating diseases in such groups, often help their participants come to some kind of common decision on how to cure a particular disease.
It is also an example of how information technology helps in medicine. There is an exchange of information between people with the same problem. And often this helps to find the right solution.
M. Rogers also appreciated the potential of genomics. Most likely, he says, this industry will help humanity more in the collection and analysis of information for a better understanding of human health and the embodiment of precision medicine than in the treatment of patients. That is, the main focus will be on the use of genomics in diagnostics and precision medicine.
