The future of precision medicine, technology in healthcare

Achieving heavy strides in healthcare, precision medicine is integrating with advanced technologies to pin-point diseases in advance. What will the future bring?

Be sure to check out Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of our 5-part interview series on precision medicine!

“The doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition,” – Thomas Edison

“Precision health will be imperative to keeping healthcare costs down, as it becomes an integral part of everyday health. The biggest opportunity is the shift from disease treatment to disease prevention,” Kevin Hrusovsky, CEO of Quanterix and Founder of Powering Precision Health echoes Edison’s words as he chats with The Sociable.

Hrusovsky passionately believes that precision health is bringing in a new era in medicine.

“Precision health will be imperative to keeping healthcare costs down, as it becomes an integral part of everyday health. The biggest opportunity is the shift from disease treatment to disease prevention”

“The ability to pinpoint the source of disease before symptoms arise will help clinicians intervene sooner and recommend lifestyle changes or preemptive treatment at the onset, verses treating disease with expensive drugs and therapies further down the line,” he says.

Effective application of technologies will enable providers to be more efficient when delivering care, more aware of patient nuances in considering the most effective treatment options and more likely to anticipate future potential health problems.

Cross-Industry Collaborations in Precision Medicine

Today, the use of AI imaging tools can screen chest x-rays and diagnose tuberculosis nearly as accurately as a human. Kathy Gibson, Chief Innovation Officer, CAS, told The Sociable that while tech and precision medicine are already going well, a need for cross-industry collaborations will arise.

“The speed and effectiveness of progress in these areas will be dependent on increased collaboration among leaders and stakeholders across the continuum of care”

“The speed and effectiveness of progress in these areas will be dependent on increased collaboration among leaders and stakeholders across the continuum of care,” she says.

She also predicts an expanding access to care in undeserved or developing areas of the world via AI-enabled diagnostics and imaging tools, which could represent a significant leap forward in the standard of care for those populations.

Precision Health Data Management Challenges

Effective data management will play a huge role in progress of precision health.

Gibson says she is already seeing examples of players historically focused on technology and information management outside of the clinical healthcare space, such as CAS, end up being critical partners to traditional healthcare organizations as they seek to advance application of these technologies.

Read More: Deep tech, big data, and their impact on precision medicine

“If we imagine a future where these data challenges can be overcome, the rate of advancement in personalizing medical treatment would be drastically accelerated by these technologies making fully customized treatments widely available and commonplace in everything from critical oncology treatment to more routine applications like prescription dosing optimization,” she says.

Owing to advances in health care analytics, AI, and blockchain, Deloitte’s 2019 Global life sciences outlook predicts that the global personalized medicine market will expand to more than 11% CAGR for the period 2017–2024.

As technology allows for greater personalization, the way we look at medicine and healthcare is changing, whether from the point of view of a patient, a doctor, or an investor in the healthcare market.