Building the healthcare system of 'me'
Transformation is happening in most industries - with data volume reaching scale like never seen before. This is no more apparent than in the Healthcare field - completely shifting the mindset of the economics of Health.
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The evolution of health and wellness will be based on you and me, as individuals. With research happening in DNA, biome and daily tracking, the medical community is finding new ways to create the healthcare system of ‘me.’ We explore some of the key trends driving this change and how the simple act of using data to move from curative to preventative will change the healthcare industry as we know it.
“The volume of health care data is growing at an astronomical rate: 153 exabytes (one exabyte = one billion gigabytes) were produced in 2013 and an estimated 2,314 exabytes will be produced in 2020, an overall rate of increase [of] at least 48% annually.”
On-Demand
The majority of health related issues spring up in the middle of nowhere, creating a negative moment of truth for patients and healthcare providers. The current world is for the patient to frantically visit “Dr Google” to see if their symptoms equate to something they should be worried about. (Dr Google always leads to something dire). However, with companies like K Health leveraging doctor visit data, they’re able to use predictive analytics to dismiss issues based on common patient information (i.e. gender, age, location, etc). The rise of this level of proactive “treatment” gives patients more insight into their current situation with an amazing data set to hand off to a doctor, if a visit is needed.
Personalized
Research and testing is abound in the healthcare field, but no more so than the studying of the micro-biome (like Naveen Jain’s Viome) and how DNA triggers health issues. The promise of these studies is to get to true personalization of health and wellness. The hypothesis will be to create a holistic approach to a patients life based on individual traits within their body, including diet, exercise needs, medication and mindfulness. As these results start to come in, more and more patients will be looking for the right treatment or preventative care for themselves and the individuals in their family.
Predictive
Understanding the elements within an individuals health and wellness will allow the medical community to expertly track and diagnose the triggers that effect long term health. With these datasets, healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies will be able to get extremely predictive when it comes to the evolution of an individuals health. Finding cancer cells before they form, developing preventative heart medications to ward off heart disease before symptoms to name two. There is no lack of data in the medical community, but the efforts pulling these datasets together to make predictions for preventative care could be a massive evolution in the health and wellness space.
Subscription
As individual’s health (both current and future) becomes more clear and predictive, the entire health and wellness industry will have to shift from curative to preventative care. This gives the power of health to the patient instead of the medical community. The business model will shift from prescribed transactions to a subscription of treatment based on an individual’s need. Heathcare systems will have to be prepared to fulfill this behavioral shift - which is coming soon.
Ready to chat more, feel free to reach out.