Our decade of opportunity in healthcare

How has dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy helped improve health­care over the past 10 years?

Extra­or­di­nary advances in health­care over the past decade indi­cate an excit­ing future for all of us. Immunother­a­py has trans­formed sur­vival for some can­cer patients; the roll­out of an effec­tive HPV vac­cine has raised the prospect of elim­i­nat­ing cer­vi­cal can­cer as a glob­al pub­lic health prob­lem; and teams in the UK have sequenced 100,000 whole genomes from NHS patients.

The dev­as­tat­ing Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, though deeply dis­rup­tive to health ser­vices in the imme­di­ate term, has act­ed as a fur­ther cat­a­lyst for the adop­tion of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. With­in 24 hours of the Zoe app launch­ing to track Covid symp­toms in the UK, for exam­ple, it had been down­loaded over 1 mil­lion times. Such engage­ment in pub­lic health research is unprece­dent­ed and offers a win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty.

How will data shape health­care inno­va­tion over the next decade?

By 2030, the way we deliv­er health­care can be rev­o­lu­tionised even fur­ther, as sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy con­verge, and the UK con­tin­ues to embrace data-dri­ven health­care. In this new era of health­care deliv­ery, sci­en­tif­ic devel­op­ments are being lever­aged to bet­ter under­stand the com­plex­i­ties of human biol­o­gy.

As such, our future health­care will  hope­ful­ly be based on ear­ly detec­tion, faster diag­no­sis and bet­ter pre­dic­tion of risk at both the indi­vid­ual and pop­u­la­tion lev­el. Tra­di­tion­al health­care data will be com­bined with oth­er kinds of data to improve deci­sion-mak­ing and bet­ter tar­get health inter­ven­tions. Pre­ven­tion will be pri­ori­tised, enabled by the appli­ca­tion of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence algo­rithms, machine learn­ing and dig­i­tal devices.

What role is Bris­tol Myers Squibb play­ing in this health­care rev­o­lu­tion?

As a pio­neer­ing bio-phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny, Bris­tol Myers Squibb is par­tic­u­lar­ly focused on the future of oncol­o­gy and the poten­tial for expo­nen­tial improve­ments in our efforts against this dis­ease. In can­cer diag­no­sis, we believe that pop­u­la­tion-wide screen­ing, lever­ag­ing new tech­niques and genom­ic and poly­genic risk scores, will enable asymp­to­matic can­cer detec­tion and ear­ly diag­no­sis at stages 1 and 2 of the disease’s pro­gres­sion. Cut­ting-edge treat­ments used at these ear­ly stages of can­cer will com­bine pre­ci­sion med­i­cine with advanced ther­a­pies to make care more spe­cialised and more per­son­alised.

How can the UK ensure this vision trans­lates to real-life advances in health­care?

By bring­ing togeth­er both tra­di­tion­al and non-tra­di­tion­al health­care datasets, the UK could become the first coun­try to rou­tine­ly use AI in diag­nos­tics, clin­i­cal deci­sion-mak­ing and dis­ease pre­ven­tion. This must be done in the most robust, secure way, pri­ori­tis­ing and pro­tect­ing the pri­va­cy of people’s health records while unlock­ing the vast pos­si­bil­i­ties of large data to improve lives.

We must also posi­tion the NHS as an engine of inno­va­tion, which means ensur­ing it gets the fund­ing nec­es­sary to clear the back­log caused by Covid-19 and lay strong foun­da­tions for the future. If we invest in NHS clin­i­cal research infra­struc­ture and stream­line approval process­es, for exam­ple, the NHS can attract more clin­i­cal tri­als, mean­ing UK patients are among the first to test the most inno­v­a­tive treat­ments glob­al­ly.

As the pace of sci­en­tif­ic advances accel­er­ates, how can the UK health sys­tem be more agile to proven inno­va­tions?

This is a chal­lenge for health­care sys­tems around the world, try­ing to grap­ple with unprece­dent­ed demand while con­tin­u­ing to advance patient treat­ment. The NHS, indus­try bod­ies and oth­er part­ners must con­tin­ue to work togeth­er – through ini­tia­tives like the Life Sci­ences Vision and Accel­er­at­ed Access Col­lab­o­ra­tive – to expe­dite the adop­tion of new tech­nolo­gies across the health ser­vice.

As we nav­i­gate this era of data-dri­ven health­care, we must also con­tin­ue to put the indi­vid­u­als at the heart of deci­sion-mak­ing about their own health­care, the appli­ca­tion of new tech­nolo­gies and the design of health sys­tems. At Bris­tol Myers Squibb, we are com­mit­ted to ensur­ing that the design of every major clin­i­cal tri­al of our med­i­cines has patient input. Sim­i­lar­ly, we must ensure that people’s needs define the future of every aspect of health­care in the UK, so that all of us can share the ben­e­fits of longer, health­i­er lives.

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it www.bms.com/gb

NO-GB-2100345. Octo­ber 2021

Pro­mot­ed by Bris­tol Myers Squibb