By Aminat Awogun
The trend of technology is advancing at exponential rate and we can’t afford to be left behind. It is progressing faster, and affecting all areas of lives. Hence, Institutions need to level up, keep abreast of current trends and adjust to the shift in order to remain relevant, else, they would be forced to take extreme risks or leave the market. Various sectors are adopting technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Genomics, Robotics, 3D printed organs. AI would become an important tool in solving futuristic problems. Tellingly, it has spread its tentacles in areas including healthcare, law enforcement, agriculture and economy. The involvement of AI in our everyday activities has led to increased productivity, reduction in cost input and reduction in man power. The implication of this is that more jobs would be loss to machines than the number of jobs that would be created by machines.
Like in many other sectors, technology has been making breakthroughs in the health sector. We are in 2020, try to imagine what the world would look like in the next 10 years. There would be a huge transformation, certainly. Imagine a world where you do not have to see the doctor before you get treated or a world where there is a possibility to predict the absolute risk of an individual to come down with a cardiovascular disease within a particular time frame. Such is the world that awaits us in the health care system.
Why do we need a change or progress in health care? When it comes to healthcare, we cannot afford to make mistakes, it costs lives. There is a need to prevent illness, reduce cost of treatment while still providing optimum treatment plan. The current healthcare system is not perfect, in fact we still have a long way to go. The goal of public health is to prevent illness and focus more on sustaining wellness, this, we can achieve with the use of technology. How? One of the biggest breakthrough in public health is the introduction of vaccines. Vaccines saving lives since the days of Edward Jenner. Vaccines were developed to provide immunity against infectious diseases. Vaccines have led to virtual eradication of certain infections that were the leading cause of death some years back, and never shall they overcome humans again. We now have vaccines for infections such as tetanus, tuberculosis, small pox, yellow fever, rabies. Etc. The first dry powder inhalable vaccine for measles is moving towards clinical trial in India. If this gets to see the day light, it means we won’t have to keep injecting ourselves to get vaccinated.
In coming years, AI would become a close friend to human doctors to help monitor the patient’s heart rate, pulse, blood glucose, blood pressure while at home and alert the physician in real time should there be a need for prompt attention without visiting the clinic. It has been reported that by 2025, connected and wearable sensors will record patients’ health at home and on the go. Patients can easily wear these devices without having an interruption in their day to day activities. An example is the natural cycles, an app that tells when to have safe sex. Introduction of chatbots would help patients input their symptoms to a programmed app and this would be able to tell if there is a need to see the physician. This system would definitely help to reduce the congestion in the hospital. Technology has gone way beyond what we can imagine and to keep up is a must for organisations to remain relevant.
Personalised medicine has come to stay and it is going to be one of the greatest development we would be seeing in the healthcare. Personalised medicine is a new frontier for managing patient’s health in which treatment plan is tailored for a patient based on patient’s age, genetics, weight, and environment. It’s a way of preventing one cap fits all in medicine and hence prevent serious adverse events that may arise from such. This would certainly be useful in the treatment of cancer and other chronic diseases. How does this work? Generation of patient’s genomic data in combination with clinical, socioeconomic and pharmaceutical knowledge and then applying analytics to these datasets provide patterns in the effectiveness of particular treatments. It does not necessarily mean the generation of new drugs but the ability to identify individual susceptibility to a disease and response to a specific treatment.
The aim of technology is not to eliminate health care professionals, but to assist in decision making and improve accuracy. Robots can help in diagnosis and perform surgery under human supervision. They would make up for the shortage of doctors in the system and it would also allow doctors to focus more on the important aspects that robots cannot take on such as empathy.
The goal of future healthcare is to achieve total prevention of diseases and we can achieve this by leveraging on technology. In our society today, many people walk around with elevated blood pressure without even knowing about it. This is because someone with elevated blood pressure may not show any symptoms until they get tested. Elevated blood pressure can be a risk factor for many cardiovascular diseases and may even cause sudden death. We need to prevent this, we need to harness technology to help people live long and maintain good health. Imagine if there was something that could warn you about a coming illness, won’t you put in effort to prevent this? That’s exactly what we need technology to achieve in the future and the future is now.
