What Role Does Technology Have to Play in the Future of Consumer Healthcare?

Technology has changed the field of healthcare in more ways than we could possibly recount. Every aspect of modern healthcare, from the moment that a patient identifies their need to consult with a doctor and right up until the point that a diagnosis is made and treatment is prescribed, technology is in play. To call many of these changes revolutionary would be an understatement, as they haven’t just revolutionized healthcare, but they have fundamentally altered the way that both patients and doctors think about it.

There are a great many challenges facing the modern US healthcare industry, and addressing these problems is undoubtedly going to require technological solutions. While not all these challenges can be solved technologically, as many will require a broader approach, technology can at the very least mitigate the impact of the various pressures that exist in the industry more broadly.

The Challenges Facing US Healthcare

The US healthcare industry is facing a number of significant threats and challenges. Of course, throughout human history, there have always been challenges facing our healthcare providers. Our health is affected by a multitude of environmental, societal, and cultural factors that constantly change over time. As a result, we can divide the challenges that are facing American healthcare into three broad categories – the practical challenges of delivering healthcare, the more abstract challenges of changing attitudes and awareness amongst the public, and the challenges of maintaining the infrastructure necessary to deliver healthcare services adequately.

Population Changes

The most significant challenges looming on the horizon for US healthcare providers are due to dramatic shifts in population demographics. The US population is getting larger and older. Either of these in isolation – an increase in the overall size of the population and the increasing average age of that population – would present a serious challenge for any healthcare system. However, these two shifts are occurring in tandem, and their combined effects represent an existential threat to our current healthcare system.

Obviously, the more people there are in the population, the harder the healthcare system will have to work to keep everyone healthy. The situation becomes more complex and challenging when that population increase is not evenly distributed across the nation. Some parts of the US are experiencing a much more significant population increase than other areas. This means that the added pressure is not being evenly distributed across the whole system.

As people grow older, their healthcare costs increase. Providing adequate care to the elderly is challenging and expensive. However, the problem of an aging population runs deeper than this. Within the next decade, we expect the number of retirement-age citizens to exceed the number of younger citizens for the first time in US history. If we continue along our current trajectory, it isn’t hard to envisage a situation where the primary function of healthcare providers will be to provide healthcare to senior citizens.

Cybersecurity

Another issue of growing concern amongst healthcare providers is that of cybersecurity. Since the turn of the millennium, healthcare has been going digital. The benefits of digitized healthcare records for patients and healthcare providers are significant. Not only do digitized records improve the accuracy of the data we hold and the ease with which it can be accessed when needed, but digital information is also much easier to search through using a computer.

Digitizing data hasn’t just made things more convenient, however. One of the biggest benefits of digitized data is the ease with which it can be harnessed for research purposes. Over the last few years, there has been a huge increase in the volume of medical data that is being processed by cloud-based applications and services. Amazon has published an entire guide for developers, advising them how they can ensure that their cloud apps are HIPAA-compliant.

However, because we are so reliant on digital databases for storing important medical information and because so much of the data contained within them is of a personal nature, cybersecurity is a key concern for the modern healthcare industry. It is also an area that the healthcare industry has a horrendous track record in. It took years of security researchers sounding the alarm about medical devices, including pacemakers, that had no cybersecurity measures at all.

When you combine this track record with the numerous high-profile data breaches in which patients’ medical data has been leaked that have occurred over the last few years, many patients are understandably hesitant to hand over their personal information. Restoring patients’ trust and making robust cybersecurity the industry standard is one of the most significant healthcare challenges that need to be overcome.

Staffing

The staffing crisis in the US healthcare industry is a very complex problem and one that many within the industry feel isn’t being adequately addressed. Not only is there a serious shortage of nurses, but there is also a shortage of workers with auxiliary skills, such as cybersecurity. In order to prepare the US healthcare system for the future, we need to take serious action to address the staffing shortage.

As well as encouraging more nurses into the profession, the healthcare industry also needs to do more to attract people with other skills. Until now, medical device manufacturers, medical technology researchers, and frontline medical staff haven’t been fantastic at talking to one another. The result is that medical devices are being built without proper consideration for issues like cybersecurity.

Going forward, there needs to be a conscious effort from within the industry to not only attract more people with non-medical skills and degrees but also to encourage the tech people to work more closely with doctors and device manufacturers. This also holds true for other supporting roles like data analytics, as bringing these workers into healthcare facilities and making them a part of the team will enable them to go from working with abstract data sets to working directly with healthcare providers to identify ways of using data analytics to implement practical changes.

Diagnostics

The faster and more accurately that we are able to diagnose health issues, the more efficiently we can treat them. Diagnostics represent a challenge for the healthcare industry for the simple reason that every diagnosis requires a doctor’s time. The time it takes to diagnose a condition does not necessarily correlate with its severity. In other words, doctors spend just as much time diagnosing simple and innocuous health conditions as they do identifying potentially life-threatening conditions.

Anything that technology can do to streamline the diagnostic process and reduce the time it takes to obtain an accurate diagnosis could make a huge difference to the efficiency with which doctors are able to work. Developing technology that is able to assist us in accurately diagnosing patients’ issues is going to be a key component of any plan for the future of US healthcare.

Technology Can Help

The issues above are among the most pressing for the industry but they are by no means the only important challenges that we will need to overcome. Technology can help us to tackle them in a variety of different ways, while also arming us with the tools, knowledge, and experience that we will need to head off other challenges in the future.

Education and Awareness

Some of the most impactful and important healthcare policies have nothing to do with hospitals, doctors, or patients. In fact, the best public health measures are those that are preventative rather than reactive – it is better to stop someone from becoming sick or injured in the first place than it is to treat them after the event. Educating the public about how they can look after their own health and how they can identify and treat the most common ailments on their own will go a long way to reducing the stress on the healthcare system as a whole.

There are numerous ways that technology will help us to get the right messages out there and ensure that they are getting in front of the right people. Public awareness campaigns are always good, but their effects are often limited to the duration of the campaign. It is much harder to produce a campaign that initiates long-term shifts in attitude among the general population.

However, through apps, websites, and social media, healthcare professionals are able to easily spread their message wider than ever before. Technology enables us to connect with young people more effectively, and the sooner we can get people thinking about and caring about their health, the better.

In terms of providing the formal education and training needed to prepare nurses and other professionals from entering the industry, a number of technological advances have meant that nurses can now complete much of their learning remotely. For example, consider someone in New York who wants to be a nurse but work in a different state. If they study one of the available online nurse practitioner programs in Texas, they can do the majority of their degree from New York and then head to Texas for their placement. For trainee nurses who want to relocate, this makes things much easier.

Digital Diagnostics

For quite some time now, one of the main goals of medical technology researchers has been to produce ways by which patients can accurately diagnose themselves. It is hard to overstate just how revolutionary this would be for the healthcare industry as a whole, as it would free up a massive amount of doctors’ time and reduce the stress placed on the healthcare system by people with easily diagnosable conditions.

There have been a number of innovations in this area. One of the most notable recent developments has been the lab on paper concept. So far, these diagnostic tools have been aimed at healthcare providers working with limited resources. However, they provide a template for the kind of technology that we want to put in the hands of patients. For example, if a patient had a device that could identify numerous potential health issues by simply being dipped in a urine sample, it would make self-testing easy and inexpensive.

Another important innovation is that of wearable diagnostic devices. Smart clothes are still in a nascent state, but they are attracting a lot of attention from the right people to take them from a concept to a set of real products. We have already seen working prototypes of a smart bra that uses ultrasonic waves to detect variations in the density of breast tissue, which can indicate a tumor.

The biggest challenge with enabling patients to diagnose themselves is accuracy. Both patients and doctors need to have complete confidence in any self-testing methods. It is also proving difficult to devise tests that can be administered and measured without any prior training. We have seen prototypes for several app-based diagnostic tools that use a smartphone’s camera to take an image and a machine-learning algorithm to analyze it and make a diagnosis.

Big Data

We touched earlier on the importance of data to the modern healthcare industry, but how exactly can it help us to face off the challenges coming our way? One of the most important ways of using this data is to train machine learning algorithms. Using machine learning, we can develop algorithms that are able to accomplish things that a human would simply be incapable of. By feeding these algorithms a large amount of data, it can spot complex patterns that would be too difficult for a human to identify.

For example, in the context of medical diagnostics, we can show a machine learning algorithm hundreds of thousands of images of a certain type of skin condition. The algorithm will then learn how to identify whether other images of patients show the same patterns and, therefore, the same condition. This is how we could ultimately diagnose some patients from an image taken with their smartphones.

There are a number of challenges facing the American healthcare industry, and overcoming them is going to be undeniably difficult. But, technology definitely has numerous roles to play in helping us overcome these challenges.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.