Healthcare technology will change lives, eventually

The future is already here; it’s just not even­ly dis­trib­uted. So said Amer­i­can-Cana­di­an writer William Gib­son, father of the cyber­punk sub-genre of sci­ence fic­tion, who has had his fin­ger on the pulse of break­through inno­va­tions for decades. His per­cep­tive com­ment is extreme­ly apt when assess­ing health­care tech­nol­o­gy in 2019.

Next-lev­el tech inno­va­tions, unimag­in­able a decade ago, are begin­ning to upgrade how patients, prac­ti­tion­ers and med­ical sys­tems inter­act with one anoth­er; they are just not even­ly dis­trib­uted, yet.

Cru­el­ly, we are afford­ed only fleet­ing glimpses of what the com­plete health­care pic­ture of the future might look like: nan­otech­nol­o­gy for the treat­ment of can­cer, for exam­ple, or genome research and manip­u­la­tion or arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) used for genome sequenc­ing.

Digital health progress has been slow in the UK

Progress has been slowed, espe­cial­ly in the UK where reg­u­la­tion is tight, through a lack of main­stream adop­tion, wari­ness of under-test­ed tech­nol­o­gy, as well as the exor­bi­tant cost and time to devel­op mar­ket-ready health­care prod­ucts.

There are, though, plen­ty of encour­ag­ing signs. “Smart­watch­es, activ­i­ty sen­sors, bio­met­rics, mon­i­tor­ing devices and health­care soft­ware appli­ca­tions are already wide­spread,” says Panos Con­stan­ti­nides, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of dig­i­tal inno­va­tion at War­wick Busi­ness School.

“These new dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies all enhance inter­ac­tions between patients, prac­ti­tion­ers and health­care sys­tems, and gen­er­ate huge amounts of use­ful data. They also ben­e­fit patients by improv­ing wait­ing times and their over­all patient path­ways, all the way to pre­ven­tion med­i­cine and bet­ter diag­noses and treat­ment options.”

When it comes to new intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies, such as robots pow­ered by deep neur­al net­works, machine-learn­ing algo­rithms used for image pro­cess­ing, big data analy­sis and oth­ers, inno­va­tors need to build pub­lic con­fi­dence and trust, says Pro­fes­sor Con­stan­ti­nides. This takes con­sid­er­able time, mon­ey and lob­by­ing.

Using data and digital tech could transform healthcare

Jake Freivald, vice pres­i­dent of mar­ket­ing at New York-head­quar­tered soft­ware com­pa­ny Infor­ma­tion Builders, posits that tech­nol­o­gy in gen­er­al and data in par­tic­u­lar have always played a part in health­care improve­ments.

Indeed, Flo­rence Nightin­gale, the founder of mod­ern nurs­ing who died 119 years ago, orig­i­nal­ly trained as a sta­tis­ti­cian. “Using data-based evi­dence, she record­ed the num­bers of deaths in mil­i­tary hos­pi­tals and showed that, after intro­duc­ing san­i­ta­tion and bet­ter nutri­tion, the mor­tal­i­ty rate fell from 42 per cent to 2 per cent,” notes Mr Freivald.

The poten­tial of health­care tech­nol­o­gy is enor­mous, says Bar­bara Harpham, chair of the Med­ical Tech­nol­o­gy Group (MTG), a not-for-prof­it group work­ing to improve patient access to effec­tive health­care tech­nolo­gies. She cites a 2017 MTG study that cal­cu­lat­ed some £500 mil­lion could be gen­er­at­ed in reduced long-term health costs and ben­e­fit pay­ments through the use of just eight tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing sep­sis diag­no­sis, wound care and coro­nary angio­plas­ty.

“Despite the vast ben­e­fits, uptake of health­care tech­nol­o­gy is often ham­pered by short-term approach­es and a myopic view on health­care bud­gets,” she says. “These fail to recog­nise the long-term ben­e­fits of reduced hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions, improved qual­i­ty of life for patients and their fam­i­lies, as well as the poten­tial to return peo­ple of work­ing age to employ­ment.”

How healthcare technology will improve patient care

Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher Eden, one of the UK’s top-ranked prostate can­cer sur­geons and an advo­cate of robot­ic surgery, argues: “Most doc­tors have a jad­ed view of dig­i­tal health solu­tions, hav­ing seen over the years so many attempts at Nation­al Health Ser­vice IT inte­gra­tion fail expen­sive­ly. We work dai­ly with tech­nol­o­gy, but the NHS’s hard­ware changes slow­ly and the soft­ware tends to run on Win­dows XP.”

The con­sul­tant uro­log­i­cal sur­geon at San­tis, a pri­vate Lon­don can­cer clin­ic spe­cial­is­ing in robot­ic prosta­te­c­to­my, con­tin­ues: “For dig­i­tal health solu­tions to be embraced, they have to offer some­thing to the doc­tor: a more effi­cient way of work­ing, improved diag­nos­tics, AI, and some­thing to the patient, notably bet­ter access to infor­ma­tion and to health­care.”

Pro­fes­sor Eden says that while the gen­er­al atti­tude towards health­care tech­nol­o­gy has changed for the bet­ter over the last decade, there is still some way to go to unlock its full poten­tial. “Doc­tors and patients now all have smart­phones and use apps, but not the same apps work­ing on the same plat­form; that’s the future,” he adds. “It’s pos­si­ble because we have the hard­ware. What is stand­ing in the way is a lack of mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary buy-in and inte­gra­tion.”

How portable devices put patients in charge

Niamh McKen­na, health lead at Accen­ture, is more opti­mistic. “There have been some excit­ing devel­op­ments in the evo­lu­tion of the smart­phone as a diag­nos­tic tool,” she says. “This is a nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion giv­en how easy it now is to con­nect inter­net of things devices to smart­phones, like those that mon­i­tor blood pres­sure or glu­cose lev­els, for instance.

“As such, diag­no­sis can now be run in a sim­i­lar way to how it would be run in a hos­pi­tal, just from a portable device. This is an easy step for clin­i­cal diag­no­sis on the move and has great poten­tial for appli­ca­tion in remote areas, like devel­op­ing coun­tries, mobile med­ical staff and self-care.”

Ms McKen­na believes the step beyond this is lever­ag­ing func­tions in the smart­phone to turn it into a med­ical device. This would be a game-chang­er, she enthus­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly in areas where it is hard to access clin­i­cians.

Will NHSX bring about the change promised? 

Neil Mesh­er, chief exec­u­tive of Philips UK and Ire­land, is equal­ly upbeat about the future of health­care tech­nol­o­gy and wel­comes the estab­lish­ment, in Feb­ru­ary, of NHSX. “This spe­cial­ist joint unit to dri­ve tech­nol­o­gy in the NHS is one way that health tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tors and indus­try lead­ers can engage more direct­ly with both clin­i­cians and the gov­ern­ment to cre­ate a cul­ture of inno­va­tion,” he says

“NHSX will accel­er­ate the adop­tion of proven, safe, test­ed exist­ing health­care tech­nol­o­gy across the sys­tem, break­ing down some of the silos that have delayed progress.”

When NHSX was unveiled, health sec­re­tary Matthew Han­cock her­ald­ed “the begin­ning of the tech rev­o­lu­tion”. Patients and prac­ti­tion­ers alike will be hop­ing it pro­vides a much-need­ed shot in the arm for the UK health­care sys­tem, and opens the the­atre door to big­ger and bet­ter inno­va­tions.