Chronic diseases continues contribute to 7 out of 10 deaths every year in
the United States.Nearly 133 million Americans are living with
at least one chronic illness.More than 75% of healthcare costs
are attributed to chronic illness.
In an effort to reduce rising healthcare costs and improve patient care, digital health is emerging as a key driver in the transformation of healthcare. Healthcare organizations and payers are quickly integrating digital health tools for healthcare professionals and consumers. There has been an increase in health tracking and consumer wearable devices like fitbit, Apple i watch ,Samsung smart watch as well as a growing catalog of more than 20 market-leading consumer apps.
We no longer live in a world where doctors can sit back and wait until a patient comes to them with a health problem. Having ready access to lab data, weight measures, lifestyle habits and many other factors gives us information into the signs that will lead to chronic disease. By looking at all these factors early on,and utilizing a healthy and diverse group of technology systems,we can proactively move our patients in the direction towards better health at a lower cost.The consumer of tomorrow will have the technology and tools at their disposal to track their health data and perform their own lab testing with smart phone consumer diagnostic blood testing devices .
A few companies like BBBtechnologies are testing a smartphone blood diagnostic device using lab on a chip technology that enables a consumer to test over 100 biomarkers with a drop of blood. With such a technology it will now be possible to test bio-markers for cardiovascular ,hepato-renal to infectious diseases related illnesses like malaria on your smart phone and get real time results from a cloud health analytic platform at the point of care within a minute with 3G enabled Wi-fi networks .The technology in development is a convergence of chip technology,cellular aggregated data analytic and blood analyzing software .
To complement consumer point of care testing there would need to be the development of the next generation device agnostic global health intelligence tools and platform technology that enables one to to look outside patient silos and see a community, county, network or state of patients, and compare them to one another . These intelligent tools would give us the ability to look across millions of patients and gain perspective of their current health status and helps understand what is happening and what is needed to gain insight to enable development of patient specific protocols and treatment plans at the point of care and in real time.
I am very enthusiastic about how such technology promises to save millions of lives and reduce the burden of children under 5 years who die from preventable infections like malaria.I am hopeful that such point of care diagnostics on a cellular phone would save billions of dollars in lost revenue due to malaria related illnesses in Africa alone. Our healthcare ecosystem in the US needs to be prepared for such disruptive changes that are happening in a fast and furious manner as there is a potential danger for merging economies like Africa to stand to gain the most as they are bypassing the status quo for the best technology available today and tomorrow.
