Future is Now
Unprecedented opportunity lies ahead in healthcare. The future of healthcare is being re-written through innovation and anticipation. Innovations create new opportunities for wellbeing, while anticipating challenges helps to unravel more of the unknown. Medical and scientific research constantly explores, expands and enables an ecosystem in which new technologies proliferate.
As we map out new healthcare contours, we must make sure that all roads lead back to patients. Through this journey into a patient-centric world, technological and medical innovations and the positive impact they bring to patients, cannot be undermined. Each breakthrough adds quality and value to human lives.
Technologies at the forefront of these continuous advances allow us to be a part of an inclusive healthcare ecosystem. Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is a multidisciplinary process that summarises information about the medical, social, economic and ethical issues related to the use of a health technology in a systematic, transparent, unbiased, robust manner. Blockchain technology is a decentralised, distributed and public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively. And artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the way healthcare is delivered and consumed. The next gen Siris and Alexas will be assistants to patients and will possibly also be able to assist in diagnostic tests. According to a recent report in The Telegraph, UK, Japan has developed robots that can lift patients out of bed and move them from one room to another. Technologies such as 3D printing, robotic prosthetics, wearable devices are some of the other positive disruptors that can help redefine healthcare.
While the future of healthcare is going to have robots working alongside humans augmenting care, new therapies and treatments play an equally important role. Immuno-oncology, for instance, targets cancer cells by enhancing the body’s own innate ability to fight off rogue invaders. The future fight against cancer will rest on understanding why some tumour cells may begin to resist these therapies and developing novel treatment combinations that are based on the unique characteristics of tumours and individual patients.
Another burgeoning area in healthcare is gene therapy, which targets a missing or non-functioning gene in a patient’s DNA and adds or replaces it with a working gene that can make a needed protein. Thereafter, the affected tissues or cells that rely on that protein will be able to function normally. Ideally, the patient won’t need ongoing treatment.
Personalised medicine tailored to the unique needs, genetic makeup and lifestyle of each patient will continue to be an important trend in healthcare. Moving past a one-size fits-all approach could lead to fewer ineffective interventions and better outcomes. For instance, a recent PwC report found that using a genetic test on breast cancer patients reduced chemotherapy use by 34 per cent. The world of clinical and biomedical research is vast, fast paced, dynamic and there is a curiosity to provide answers to unanswered questions. Today is already yesterday and the future is now!
