In a keynote session at Allscripts Client Experience 2012 in Chicago on Aug. 16, Daniel Kraft, MD, an oncologist and executive director and curator of FutureMed at Singularity University, discussed future technologies that will impact healthcare and medicine.
In the session, Dr. Kraft discussed key challenges of healthcare today and how emerging and exponential technologies — technologies that provide faster, smaller, cheaper and better solutions — can improve healthcare delivery and population health.
Some of the challenges that currently impact healthcare delivery listed by Dr. Kraft include:
- Dramatics costs;
- Aging demographics;
- Access issues;
- Variation in clinical practice;
- Inefficient use of information;
- Fragmented, not integrated, care;
- Defensive and duplicative medicine; and
- Costs
At the same time, though, exciting technologies are emerging that offer promising implications for healthcare. He believes these technologies will lead healthcare toward achieving the “4Ps” — predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory medicine.
Dr. Daniel Kraft, right, with Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman
"We have the opportunity to reinvent healthcare," Dr. Kraft said. "We've certainly done that in other fields."
Dr. Kraft then provided specific examples of some of the technologies that are helping to transform healthcare:
iPhone apps and extensions. iPhone and iPad apps and extensions are providing cheaper ways to obtain diagnostic information. Dr. Kraft demonstrated a $5 iPhone case that when placed against the chest can provide a real-time EKG. He also showed a glucose meter that attaches to an iPhone and shares results on the phone's screen. The results can then be electronically shared with a provider.
Artificial intelligence. IBM Watson — yes the same one that won Jeopardy — is an example of how artificial intelligence is already being applied to healthcare in intelligent ways, Dr. Kraft explained. Drawing on multiple evidence-based guidelines and sources, IBM Watson is able to analyze patient information and provide a possible diagnosis in a matter of seconds. This sort of analysis will become more valuable as the complexity of data grows. That is, as we gain more information on conditions and possible treatments, the harder it becomes for physicians to keep up to date.
Other less complex tools also use algorithms to analyze data and make diagnoses. For example, more and more radiological scans are read first by algorithms, rather than a radiologist. Dr. Kraft also discussed an iPhone app for questionable moles that scans an image of a mole and then provides information on whether or not it could be dangerous.
Telemedicine and home-based diagnostics. Dr. Kraft called telemedicine "a huge game changer for medicine," as it will increase access and reduce costs. Twenty percent of physician visits do not require physical touch, so various applications — including apps for mobile devices — are entering the market to connect patients to physicians virtually. In addition, home-based diagnostics are exploding, allowing patients to perform and share results of diagnostic tests with physicians. For example, a new blood pressure cuff attaches to an iPhone and can take and share blood pressure readings, and a new $100 piece of equipment now allows patients to perform and share results of a sleep test.
Genomics. An individual's genomes can now be sequenced for $1,000, and Dr. Kraft anticipates the cost could come down to $100 by 2015. As this information becomes more widely used, it can be analyzed to provide more personalized treatments. For example, pharmacogenomics will be able to identify "the right drug, for the right person at the right time," said Dr. Kraft.
This is just a sampling of some of the exciting technologies currently or soon-to-be on the market Dr. Kraft shared during the session. He also highlighted a few technologies that aren't "quite there yet" but are the next frontier for medical technology. Examples of these include individualized surgery and nanotechnology, the latter of which could lead to molecule-sized technologies to deliver drugs or treatments, such as destroying atherosclerosis at the molecular level.
Capturing and making use of data
As new technologies come on the scene, they will populate more and more data that can be captured, analyzed and used to inform healthcare decision making for both the patient and population level. The challenge is taking the massive amounts of "big data" healthcare is creating and making it actionable and useful. The result of which Dr. Kraft calls a paradigm shift, characterized by the "ability to pull together and reinvent therapies in new ways." New technologies are converging very quickly, he said, and in the future, they’ll allow us to provide healthcare in a system that "moves away from a same-size-fits-all mentality to a personalized and effective one" as well as one that costs less, promotes health and where patients actively participate in their care.
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