While the machinery is working on reducing cost of generic medications, we really want adequate money to be spent and intelligent minds to be working on best of innovations in health and be able to compensate them for their best of efforts. Now this gets you into catch 22 with debate on how much profit you really want them to be able to make.
I strongly believe that the above argument is coming to an end. The way Moors law worked on hardware, in healthcare the targeted therapies and predictive and proactive approaches are going to reduce the number of incidents by more than 80 %. This huge reduction will make way for money to be spent in the most critical areas of healthcare.
In the US, CMS has already started working on outreach programs to reduce hospitalization of comorbid patients. Programs like these are getting acceptance in developed countries through effective control on payer side. Today, a lot of health insurance providers are giving special discounts on gym membership and other preventive health measures.
While the number of incidents is getting reduced, Big Data is going to play a huge role to take NNT( Number
Needed to Treat) to a perfect score of 1. This will eliminate discussion on side effects of the treatment.
Registries for reporting to making use of registries for effective management of conditions In the past, a lot of data was being captured by various government and other organizations to understand criticality and severity of a particular disease. While it helped us to target treatments like Polio in the past, technology has now already started moving to the next logical step.
You don’ t need connected hospital systems anymore to be able to identify outbreaks. Google has proven it in the last few outbreaks already, by providing just the search terms in search engine to predict with high accuracy for effective management of those outbreaks.
Can we take disease registries to the next level to add not only clinically relevant data but also twitter tweets, facebook updates and whatsapp private chats, etc.? Can we profile registries by genomic markers?
Can we make all the registries open to researchers to be able to do meaningful research? Can the exceptional cases with positive outcomes across the globe be analyzed to get effective treatment protocols which are evidence based, not in a clinical trial, but in real life cases.
Large Health facilities to Home based tele-health
Health systems evolved with necessity of creating best infrastructure to get best diagnostic services, and then best of healthcare. Currently, the large facilities can afford best of technology with accurate monitoring capabilities and speedy treatment.
Very soon the wearable technology is going to be ubiquitous and highly accurate with support from required deep learning algorithm. This, linked with efficient response system from health worker on tele-health platform, will take away need for patients to present themselves in hospitals. Robots are already making their way in telehealth.
This single change is not only going to improve efficiency of the whole healthcare delivery system but will also be highly beneficial to the patient community.
36 December 2017