Two weeks since Wired Health 2019 was held at the Francis Crick Instituteand we’re still buzzing with excitement and inspiration. In this first part of a two-part blog, we revisit three interesting things we’ve heard at the event.
The future is AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) had its fair share of mentions at the stages and panels discussions at Wired Health 2019.
On the main stage, Moorfields Eye Hospitalconsultant Pearse Keaneand Google DeepMindgave an impressive demo of an AI system capable of diagnosing eye disease in real time. Hosted on the cloud, this neural network analyses information from optical coherence tomography (OCTs) scans and can provide useful reports to indicate to specialists warning signs that merit further attention. Whilst OCT scans are available from high-street opticians, few people are able to interpret them and this system can help identify people in urgent need of medical help. Often, a delay in diagnosing the underlying problem and initiating treatment can mean those patients run the risk of losing their eyesight.
The topic of ‘whether AI will displace physicians or not’ was also mentioned during a panel discussion at Wired Health 2019. The panelists agreed that algorithms will start to play a bigger role in clinical decision making in the future and the role of the physician will evolve. AI will not displace doctors, but doctors who use AI will almost certainly displace doctors that won’t.
Perhaps the most intruguing insight came from Dr Bertalan Meskóof the Medical Futurist, who mentioned that AI in medicine is not just a vision for the future but in fact something that is a reality now. Dr Meskó predicted doctors will need to use more the skills they learned in medical school: critical decision-making, problem-solving, creativity and empathy; all very difficult to bottle in an algorithm!
Our comment: AI is indeed an inevitability in healthcare, but we need to do everything we can to ensure not only future doctors, but current ones embrace this new technology and are prepared for the changes it will bring to their daily practice.
The future is portable imaging
For the past 40 years, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has proven to be an extremely useful diagnostic method. But millions of people do not have access to MRI scanners that typically cost millions of dollars and are available only in hospitals.
The question of bringing high-quality diagnostic imaging to more people is what has recently caught the attention of Mary Lou Jepsen. Her start-up, Openwater, is attempting to bring real disruption in the field of medical imaging, by promising to produce portable fMRI machines at a fraction of the cost of the current machines. Using infrared light and a series of sensors, she explained how the technology works (see also her TED talk here) and how the latest advances in sensor manufacturing can now make this technology possible.
But besides the cutting-edge science, Mary Lou’s talk and panel discussion were about putting the patient in the driver’s seat. It was about enabling the patient to do more, giving the patient the tools to identify, with the help of their doctors and others, what it is they are suffering from and how they can best monitor their health in real-time.
Our comment: Portable fMRI machines are great, but to reduce patient anxiety from ‘obsessive’ self-monitoring, we need to educate people how to use these new technology and to how to exercise caution when attempting to interpret the results without access to an expert.
The future is data
For Pamela Spence, one of the authors of the EY report “Unlocking the Power of Data to Improve Health Outcomes: Five trends to Watch“ it is clear we need to treat health data as we treat our bank accounts: to be able to have access to them, understand and interact with them but not use them to make complex decisions without the help of experts.
Today, what prevents us from realising this goal is the absence of a set of common protocols. Those common protocols will enable us to bring the pockets of data recorded by the millions of sensors together and will enable us to combine them to generate insights that will be unique to us. Only then will we be able to harness the true potential of our data.
When this happens, we will gradually see a shift from healthcare being practiced in the traditional establishments (e.g. hospitals) to healthcare being practiced “anytime, anywhere”
Our comment: Establishing these common protocols seems to be the next step, but who is expected to lead this initiative? Government bodies, healthcare establishments or consortiums of commercial companies? What does it take to bring all stakeholders together?
Join us next week, for the second update from Wired Health 2019, where we’ll review the Wired Health Startup Showcase, revisit Prof. Dame Sally Davies’ interview and more…