To paraphrase Canadian-American speculative fiction writer William Gibson: The future of health care is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.
We live in a world where science continues to create miracles: researchers can insert miniature human organs onto microchips to simulate how the human body will respond to experimental treatments. There are gene therapies that not only treat cancer or sickle cell disease, but can even cure them.
At the same time, half of all people in the world do not have access to basic medical care.
I was privileged to join political, business and cultural leaders at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in May to help guide the global community‘s response to the world’s most pressing challenges. As the CEO of a company on a mission to transform global health, I was struck by what Kenyan humanitarian activist Umra Omar said on the final day of the forum: “We’ve already built the Ferrari” of health care. What is missing is the road.”
While innovations rightly grab the headlines, these advances will not benefit the millions of people who need them without collective action to deliver them at scale. The question is how will it be done?
This is where I think leaders should focus to help move healthcare innovation from the lab to the exam room—or, better yet, the living room.
Learn from pandemic experiences
Covid-19 has exposed the fragility of the global health system. But I am reminded of the saying, “Only earthquakes give birth to tall mountains. To see also : ‘Slave Methods’ is a technology-based trademark where some slaves are sold in the French Quarter.” So what has the pandemic taught us?
Health inequality is a threat to the global order. As new variants of Covid-19 spread around the world, it’s strange to think that policymakers in the developed world once believed they only needed to vaccinate their own populations. People today are too interconnected for this outdated way of thinking.
Economic stability is impossible without strong public health. As Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera so succinctly said in his Davos panel on investing in health equity, the pandemic has shattered the illusion that public health is “only” a social issue—it’s also an economic one. The possibility of a looming global recession makes this clear. I also reject the idea that social ills are less urgent than economic ones.
Do more than is useful to provide health care (and certainly not less). From drone drug delivery in India to the belated adoption of telemedicine in the US, the pandemic has forced a global rethink of how healthcare is delivered. In the developing world, where medical and technological infrastructure is being born, people say they want more innovation. In the developed world, where the infrastructure is robust, there is resistance to change and even signs of regression. The temptation to backslide can be strong—and must be guarded against.
Make the business case for eliminating social drivers of health
No one should receive inferior health care because of their race, gender, income, or place of birth. To see also : Americans’ top post-pandemic travel priorities. But many do. Unfortunately, the saying “If you build it, they will come” does not apply here.
Access to health care currently depends on money, gender, race, geography and many other intertwined, deeply rooted factors. And access is only the most obvious measure of health equity. Consider this: If I get sick, there’s a good chance I’ll continue to work from home with minimal disruption. But for a single mother whose job doesn’t allow this flexibility, falling ill could force her to choose between working sick – and thereby exposing others to the risk of further health complications – or losing her income and even her job. In the end, she, her family and her community will suffer the negative effects.
Addressing health inequities requires consideration not only of access to care, but also who bears the ultimate consequences of inequities and how those consequences are distributed.
Overcoming health injustice requires human-centred design, focused government policy and partnerships that include stakeholders with a range of interests and incentives to contribute. Here’s an example of how this works: In Philadelphia, public health systems, community organizations, and the pharmaceutical company Novartis teamed up to address the dramatically higher incidence of cardiovascular disease in the city’s low-income neighborhoods. They do this by targeting specific populations through trusted community institutions such as churches and barbershops.
It’s a noble (and promising) project, but for more life science companies to engage in these kinds of partnerships, advocates for greater health equity must be prepared to articulate not only a moral case for solving social problems, but also a financial case.
The future solvency of global health systems will depend on the ability to shift resources from disease management to disease prevention. A September 2021 survey of more than 4,000 US adults and physicians by ZS, the company I run, found that roughly three out of four respondents want more focus on prevention. Yet less than 3% of current health care spending in the US and E.U. was assigned to preventive care. The rest goes to the treatment of diseases. For future-proof global health systems, we need to target the split of health care spending: 30% for preventive care, 50% for curative care, and 20% that is never spent.
Accelerate the biotech revolution
Biotech innovation happens too slowly. While many of today’s health technologies and treatments are awe-inspiring, the pace at which they are helping patients has been too incremental. On the same subject : Shawn Mendes taking a break for mental health: Can celebrities fight stigma?. We are in danger of biotechnology creating a few incredible advances that do not add up to the health care revolution we need given the scale of the challenges we face. Here’s how to fix it.
Pharma must think bigger in its quest to develop drugs with revolutionary potential. New science in itself should not drive research and development; Advances such as more efficient, pragmatic trials that have the potential to deliver the greatest impact to the most people in the shortest possible time must be pursued.
Governments must facilitate innovation by removing outdated barriers to innovation, especially in mature healthcare markets, and enact policies that create incentives to encourage cutting-edge research. It takes an average of 17 years for healthcare innovations to move from discovery to patient use. It wouldn’t take a pandemic to show us that it’s too slow. High-income countries owe it to the rest of the world to lead the way.
Go big with AI — but cautiously
Artificial intelligence can identify some cancers faster and more accurately than clinicians, detect Parkinson’s disease and congestive heart failure based on the sound of a person’s voice, and sift through vast amounts of compounds to spot tomorrow’s drugs. But it is also open to misuse — and even abuse — through invasion of privacy, theft of sensitive data, biases that reinforce existing power structures, and other risks.
One possible way to strike a balance between the promise of AI and its dangers is to use inclusive design, by which I mean that those most at risk of abuse or misuse participate in the creation and design of AI. But since this may not be practical in many cases, I propose a framework for building trust based on three principles.
Responsibility. AI has the power to solve an unlimited array of challenges. Developers must be careful and aware of selecting the “right” ones – those with the potential to do the greatest good while limiting harm.
Competence. To be accepted, AI must work as advertised. Like humans, it will never be infallible. But it must work better than the alternatives, and real-world evidence must be used to confirm (and reconfirm) its effectiveness.
Transparency. Doctors and patients must be fully informed of the risks and benefits of any AI-based application they may use.
Tailor solutions for all countries
Connected health has the power to transform the way people everywhere access healthcare. But with health care as inequitable as it is today, solutions to make it more equitable must fit their environment. Only 27% of low-income countries (and 57% of middle-income countries) have broadband networks—a significant barrier to widespread adoption of digital health tools, telehealth, and other advances that could dramatically improve access to health care for lower-income people. countries.
On the positive side, many of these countries do not have powerful, entrenched health care systems that need to be dismantled. In India, for example, there is a shortage of approximately one million doctors, leaving tens of millions of people without access to basic medical care. When this is the status quo, portable and AI smartphone applications – supplemented by drone delivery and relatively inexpensive community health workers – become a very attractive alternative.
A country like the US, on the other hand, has a fairly good technological infrastructure to support digital health innovation. But it is also home to a deeply entrenched health care system comprised of an intricate web of players, many working at multiple ends and most with a bias toward maintaining the status quo. Even though my smartwatch might be able to warn me of a potentially serious heart attack, will the local hospital admit me based on this lone signal? And if so, will my insurer cover the visit?
America’s disorganized health care system, with its focus on disease management rather than prevention, is not currently set up to accept this kind of proactive approach to medicine.
Bring the future of health care to all by thinking big and starting now
Providing quality healthcare to everyone will not be easy and cannot be achieved by just one entity. There will always be a tension between the hunger for rapid, revolutionary innovation and the need for constant progress that involves all stakeholders who stand to gain – or lose – from change. Although innovation can happen faster when parties act alone, scaling innovation is impossible without broad partnerships between multiple stakeholders.
So, while today’s healthcare ecosystem consists of a multitude of stakeholders to align and connect, the scale and complexity of the challenges require a collective approach. Only a coalition of public and private enterprises, operating through a mixture of enlightened self-interest and desire for the common good, has the power to deliver on the promise of transforming global health.
Pratap Khedkar is the Chief Executive Officer of ZS Associates, a management consulting firm focused on healthcare.
