Last week, Open Web Technology had the chance to attend the Singularity University Exponential Medicine Summit. For one week, we discussed new technologies, healthcare problems, global health, and how they all form an exponential ecosystem. We learned a lot, and here's the most important.
Situation of healthcare in 2018
Before introducing the
major breakthroughs we discovered, it is important to understand what
healthcare is today. There are three main opportunities in
the health world.
1. Healthcare is the most expensive it has ever been,
because of the aging population, the rise of mental diseases and the
increase in research costs. If we focused on preventing instead of just
treating, we could lower costs by almost 30%.
2. Opinions triumph on data when it comes
to medicine. If every diagnosis was based on systematic trials and studies,
almost 50%
of the recommendations made in guidelines could be different as they
usually are based on opinions or case studies.
3. Medical errors are the third most common causes of death.
With new technologies, 25% of necessary interventions could avoid being
missed.
However, health workers everywhere are trying to improve their
domain, and ease those three pains.
What's coming in 2019?
Revolutions in the world of medicine now happen almost every day, from amazing discoveries to never before seen solutions emerging more frequently. During the week we spent in San Diego, we discussed many trends and ground-breaking solutions. Here are the ones we were most impressed by.
From doctor-first to patient-first
Medicine is not
made by doctors anymore. Today, patients know what they want, and drive
initiatives for cures and treatments themselves. For example, crowd-sourcing
leads to the most efficient medical trials. But today, 48% of research sites
fail to recruit enough people when 87% of patients would like to participate
in them. On those 87%, less than 3 will participate, according to Noah
Craft.
By creating a platform to bridge the gap between patients and
research sites, science 37 offers a
solution to this issue.
Individualized treatments
Nowadays, thousands of
treatments exist, all made to heal an averaged population. But hardly anyone
fits 100% in the “average” category, and this can lead to discrepancies
between a treatment's expected effect and its actual effect on one
individual, sometimes even worsening the condition. Take diabetes for
example. It used to be Type I or Type II, but today we can identify multiple
sub-titles, as explained by Daniel Kraft.
This allows diabetes patients to be treated better, with finer
granularity in the treatments. Today, we are slowly shifting from a mass
product of standard medicines to a custom made medicine, where patients are
scanned to create tailor made treatments based on their condition, body,
habits, etc.
Longevity
Living longer is a wish many of us have, but
only if it means living in perfect condition. Many disease and problems come
with ageing, like Alzheimer's for example.
However, a team of researchers at United Neurosciences are
developing a vaccine to the disease, which could prevent every person
carrying the gene to contract the disease, presented Mei Mei Hu.
Many other trends were discussed, such as de-aging solutions, biopharmaceuticals medicine or new wearables. At OWT, we will keep those trends in mind to help our clients in health go digital.
Learn more about our health cases:
Enabling smart drug administration with IoT
Serving all organ donors and receivers in Switzerland
