NHS Consortium for Global Health

The NHS Consortium for Global Health provides a single point of access to expertise from the UK’s national health organisations, including the major National Health Service executive agencies and public bodies.

Technical capabilities:

•Pandemic Response, Health Security, & Climate Change

•Workforce Planning & Development

•Health Financing & Strategic Purchasing

•Digital Health & Transformation

•Public Health & Reduction of Health Inequalities

•Health Technology Assessment, Clinical Guidelines & Quality Improvement

•Genomics in Healthcare

•Government Relations

•Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning

To find out more about working with the NHS Consortium for Global Health, contact:

Kevin Miles, Senior Lead Global Health Partnerships, Health Education England Stewart House, 32 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1B 5DN

E: kevin.miles@hee.nhs.uk

M: +44 (0)7467 004 560

It’s time to build the future together, says Daniel Kraft

M.D. Physician-Scientist and Innovator

When we think of the metaverse, we tend to think about traditional VR and AR. But how can we now connect the dots to combine our global healthcare knowledge in a new digital intelligence that is more data driven? Part of this new world of metaverse or medaverse will be generative health where we can create environments, instructions and patient communications on the fly, and match the individual or the age cultural language. It’s the beginning of a very exciting age minuses that’s going to really evolve very quickly.

Healthcare is built upon not just one technology but by the interface and convergence of many accelerating technologies. As a result, it can get very siloed in technologies and clinical fields.

The opportunity now is to overlap them and put them together to enable us to solve things in new ways and, leverage the new technologies that didn’t exist 20 years ago when I was a Stanford medical student. It’s a really exciting time to rethink and reimagine health care, not just for now, but for the next decade.

The convergence of VR and web3 in new forms of connectivity will help us move beyond the sick care model of traditional medicine to precision wellness and optimizing health span as well as lifespan. We will move the needle from where we are now - an intermittent reactive, one size fits all sick care- to a future that’s much more health and selfcare focused.

Daniel Kraft Founder NextMed Health,

Daniel Kra is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator with degrees from Brown University and Stanford. He specialises in internal medicine and pediatrics (Harvard residency) and has fellowships in hematology, oncology, and bone marrow transplantation at Stanford. He was one of the keynote speakers at Informa’s Future of Healthcare event at Arab Health this year and o en called upon to speak to the future of health, medicine and technology.

COVID has been a catalyst - we went from incremental to exponential. Yet despite the explosion of telehealth during the pandemic, we are still back to waiting rooms and thinking about healthcare in old fashioned silos, rather than the metaverse.

If we look ahead 10 years, we must be careful not to have a failure of imagination. Even the next one or two years will make the last decade look slow. Of course, healthcare needs to move a little more slowly than some other fields and we need to have some guardrails.

I’ve been looking at the convergence of future for a while. At our recent Next Med Health conference in San Diego, 400 people from 30 plus countries looked at the future of diagnostics 10 years ago in the shape of a basic ECG or EKG on a phone. Now a phone camera can diagnose vitals in about 10 or 20 seconds. And they can be diagnostic devices too. There is an Israeli company that can undertake urine analyses via phones straight away. There are many examples where wearables and other models can measure almost every element of our physiology from patches to ultrasound devices to sensor socks and underwearables. Now we can predict pregnancy five days before a pregnancy test, and also understand a COVID booster response. Acoustic epidemiology can diagnose whether you have a cold or COVID from the sound of your voice. Mike Slater and others at Stanford have just published evidence we’ve already started seeing very low cost scanners come to market in the last two years. There are even wearable versions that can diagnose strokes or haemorrhages that don’t just measure the brain but also provide therapeutic energy to treat certain neurologic diseases.

The big picture in this new metaverse is that the diagnostic toolset is moving from our hospital to home to our pocket via a whole new set of tools that can enable anybody to listen to a heart and diagnose a murmur. And of course, this can be blended with air or via intelligence augmentation to give us the ability to see replace the radiologists. And when there’s no radiologist, they can do a pretty good job of doing initial readings, whether it’s radiology, pathology, dermatology and even gastroenterology.

Bio intelligence can stream an intensive carrying level of data, but we still have a challenge of understanding who owns that data, and how do we even take small data and send a patient home from a hospital visit?

from all di erent angles, from psychedelics to chatbots to drones and more. Part of the theme was the digital twin, the ability to layer all this information together and make it useful for the optimisation of health prediction, diagnostics, therapy, public and global health. As an oncologist, I think it’s going to be particularly applicable to personalised oncology, both in prevention diagnostics and therapy.

As we look at this metaverse, we need to keep in mind that it’s still a little clunky, but things are moving in an exponential manner. For example, our phones are going to start dissolving theoretically this year into air guided glasses or dissolving drug contact lenses. We saw the evolution about the use of wearables to predict who has COVID, sometimes two or three days before a positive COVID test.

Another area that’s moving quickly is imaging diagnostic imaging or predictive imaging and we’re now leveraging these into new ways of predicting everything from Alzheimer’s to cancers. For example, I had a scan a few weeks ago for a full body MRI enhanced with AI radiology in just 60 minutes. It gave me pretty good deep insights into my health and I can communicate that to my primary care doctor as well.

In the next decade we’ll see the ability to go to the local pharmacy and have a whole body scan at a very low price -

The even bigger challenge is how to integrate all this data to make it really useful for the individual, the clinician and the health care system. Everything is becoming digital – right the way through to prescribing digital apps and therapeutics as opposed to drugs and devices. There are now more than 250,000 digital health related solutions. Some of them are very clear, like digital therapeutics that treat ADHD with a video game as opposed to medication and these are now blending with empowering the patient. Each of us now can take our quantified data and make it more useful.

But increasingly, our quantified, connected data from our wearables and other tools are going to shi to our metaverse-based conditions to optimise wellness, to diagnose disease early, and then to treat disease in a much more personalised and intelligent way. With all of this connecting to our smartphones, we can start to crowdsource that knowledge project baseline to make sense of it, either to create a warning system score for every individual or patient, like an engine check light for the body. Thus, we are entering an era of predicting diseases before we even know we have them.

Another challenge is to make sense of this new universe of technologies. I’ve recently launched a platform called Digital Dial to search for any new technology. I don’t work for these companies or have any real a iliation, but it is a good resource for discovering what is already out there.

Finally, the challenge of all these new forms of tools and technologies is to integrate them into the workflow of the already overwhelmed physician, nurse, pharmacist. No clinician wants more data. We want the actionable information, and there’s an opportunity not just to prescribe digital solutions, but to connect the dots in the virtual and the physical space and to make it part of the clinician workflow. One recent example is a new Microso solution that will listen to the patient doctor interaction and write it up, so the clinician won’t have to spend so much time navigating horrible EMR systems.

Part of this future will be increasingly crowdsourced. Just like we crowdsource our driving, we can imagine a real time Google Maps or Waze for healthcare. Being a data donor empowers each of us to be part of the solution. The future of care is going to shi from our usual intermittent episodic once a year check-up to a future with much more proactive information that can take place anywhere at much lower cost, democratising healthcare across the world.

Chat bots are getting better and better at knowing you. They will have your entire medical history and they’ll be leveraging wearable data and beyond. And of course, that brings us to this era of the metaverse. How will we interact with our care teams in a virtual hospital or caregiving location where your doctor will show up as an avatar, as demonstrated by AI Medis at Arab Health?

So how do we learn as clinicians to interact and have a good website manner as well as a good bedside manner? The whole future of medical education needs to be looked at. Part of the metaverse is medical education - we can now simulate and learn in virtual environments and practise on patients, just like pilot practice in a flight simulator.

Fortunately, global ecosystems are opening up. Starlink, for example, is providing internet access to almost 50 per cent of remote and rural locations across the globe, creating massive amounts of new data. And our opportunity in the new metaverse is not just that data, but actual information that’s useful to the clinician and the patient.

I’m excited about this new metaverse or new health age. It’s not about any one technology but how we connect the dots, escaping from our old ideas and mindsets to solve some of the highest and hardest problems in healthcare. It’s an incredible time to be thinking about where we might go next. If we take the new exponential and collaborative mindset, we can go for more. It’s time to not predict the future, but build it boldly together.