Creating a digitally integrated health system Healthcare World’s Steve Gardner speaks to Richard Oakley, Neil Mason and Jodi Carter of Methods Analytics about the intricacies of developing and building a fully digitally integrated health system
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ver the past 40 years, technology has changed the world in a way not seen since the industrial revolution. If you told someone in the 1980s that we’d be watching television on our phones, and have the ability to shoot studio-quality videos accessible to everyone around the world in just a few seconds, all from a device the size of your wallet, they wouldn’t believe you. HD TV would be jaw-dropping. Cryptocurrency? Artificial Intelligence? Virtual Reality? Don’t even try to explain. But it’s not just smartphones that have had a profound impact on the world. The digital age has completely revolutionised every sector of human interaction both in business and our day to day lives. Yet, within healthcare, the sheer potential of this new age has not been realised - not even close.
Consider the health systems that you may have on you as you read this. A smart watch, for instance - which can not only monitor your pulse and oxygen saturation, but also detect atrial fibrillation. Steptrackers which record your daily exercise without even thinking about it. Continuous glucose monitors that can notify diabetics at a moment’s notice of their blood sugar levels. These are only a select few of the multitude of personal health devices we can now access. The technology today enables people to take charge of their own healthcare like never before. Yet, this itself is an issue. While the benefit of personal digital health solutions, and the data from them is potentially profound, how can we apply this to health systems at large? Obviously, the data collected from just one person’s digital health profile alone would be huge so from a few thousand individuals? Astronomical.
Then how do we bring this data together and produce meaningful and actionable insight to improve the health of individuals and populations? This is why I spoke to Methods Analytics’ Richard Oakley, Head of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Neil Mason, Head of Healthcare Strategy, and Jodi Carter, Head of Healthcare Sector, to understand how we can build a digitally integrated healthcare system. If all the current apps, technologies, websites and more were merged together, would we have everything we need to create an end to end digitally integrated health system? Neil: I’d say no - but we are on our way and getting close. We’re fortunate, particularly in the UK, to have a National Health Service that collects a huge amount of data, but it is very disparate. If you could pull it all together, you would have a wonderful resource. It’s the quantified self that is still nascent - all the personal data that people are amassing now. How easy it is to share the data is a big question, yet in the relatively near future we will be at a point where you could begin to think that you might have sufficient to start transforming the way we deliver and think about healthcare.
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