Josh Lemieux, Chief of Staff for Health and Life Sciences at Intel speaking at the recent Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health Symposium, described how the worldwide healthcare community is faced with mega challenges requiring new technologies and tools to be developed to find workable solutions.
One of the major challenges involves global aging where it is expected there will be an aging population over 60 of about two billion by 2050. At the same time, the world will be faced with a worker shortage where it is expected that there will be a 4.3 million global shortfall of doctors and nurses.
As expected, there will be rising healthcare costs and there will be a 50 percent increase worldwide in healthcare costs by 2020. To add to the problem, inefficiency resulting in poor patient experiences will result in billions being wasted annually.
As reported, there are several ways to deal with these issues. A few solutions would be to enable the healthcare and medical community to go from volume to value-based care, incentivize public investments in health IT globally, provide more devices for consumers to increasingly engage patients with apps, and upgrade smartphones along with other 21st century devices.”
Lemieux presented some other ideas. One change would be to really increase care network coordination. This would enable the shift in the healthcare and medical field to go from solo to team-based care across organizations and IT systems. This would result in a shift towards using self-services online and tools to enable care coordination.
Coordinating care and utilizing the best in technology would produce a care anywhere environment which would enable mobile health to shift from institutions to more home-based community care. Also, by developing much needed trusted standards, there would be a shift to trusted mobility that would easily enable clinicians and patients to utilize technologies such as telehealth.
Patients along with clinicians are looking forward to using remote monitoring to enable information to be transmitted via sensors on the body. For example, watches could be made available to help Parkinson’s patients track motions and then eventually shift Parkinson’s patients to even more promising high end medical devices to more successfully track their motions 24/7.
Care customization could be used to go from population-based care to person-based treatments. This may require the use of big data and genetic information to do predictive modeling of individuals.
For instance, customization of drugs used during cancer treatment could be done to determine the chemo level to use with individual cancer patients. This would require software to be developed to perform predictive models that would enable the use of not only precision therapies but also the use of precise pharmaceuticals directed to specific individuals.