Genome sequencing, smartphone apps, wearable sensors, and social media will provide continuous patient health updates. Will packaging play a role?
The way medicine is currently practiced will be fundamentally transformed by a new consumer revolution, predicts cardiologist and visionary Dr. Eric J. Topol in his new eBook, "The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care."
Topol is an innovator and pioneer in the fields of wireless medicine and genomics. He serves as vice chairman at the West Wireless Health Institute (WWHI), a nonprofit medical research organization with the sole mission of lowering health care costs. He is also the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and professor of genomics at The Scripps Research Institute.
Topol explains how bringing "big data" to the clinic, laboratory, and hospital, along with wearable sensors, smartphone apps, social networks, and whole-genome sequencing will provide the tools for a revolution. He argues that combining all of the data generated by those tools will create a complete and continuously updated picture of every patient, changing everything from the treatment of disease, to the prolonging of health, to the development of new treatments.
"We now have the extraordinary, innovative tools to digitize human beings and prevent diseases and conditions that otherwise would occur. However, the only way this can move forward is through a consumer revolution-the reason I wrote the book," said Topol.
"Health care is at a crisis point as costs rise to almost $2.5 trillion annually in the U.S. alone," said Don Casey, CEO of WWHI. "Dr. Topol translates both his vision and his practical experience as a doctor and researcher and offers an extraordinary path forward. He is engaging us in the right conversation, by shining the light on both revolutionary and every day advances that will transform health care delivery and ultimately lower the cost of delivering care."
Exciting as these possibilities are in terms of advanced technology and medical treatment, the prospect of "continuously updated pictures of every patient" begs numerous questions. What about patient rights and confidentiality? Costs? Who will monitor all of this information? What are the legal ramifications? And what role will packaging play in this process? Will consumers be able to use smartphones to transfer information from sensors and the packages of their medications to some type of health network where medical analysts and a new generation of medical equipment/devices track and evaluate that data, then electronically send it to medical professionals to deliver personalized treatment regimens to patients? The possibilities seem fascinating, and the prospects good for the creation of sophisticated jobs and careers.
