Five thousand years ago, healthcare was more about diet than medicines, more about the healing touch than a surgeon’s scalpel. Fast food was about the chase to capture the animal we hunted, and humans slept from dusk to dawn.  Yet more than half the population died before the age of 5 and another 25% died before the age of 30. Average life expectancy was 32 as recently as 1920. Modern medicine compensated for infections, surgical interventions reduced organ damage, social changes minimized famine, plague and political dialogue reduced mortalities due to war and conflict. As a result, today, life expectancy has risen to over 70, and less than 5% die before the age of five. 

Today, we sit on the couch, eat from cans, drink fermented beverages, and lie sick in the bed. An aging population, growing obesity combined with poor lifestyle choices deliver a triple blow to our healthcare budgets and place enormous strains on current resources and infrastructure to deliver world-class care at optimal cost. 

Digital health built upon several innovative technologies may well be the only solution to this growing crisis in health management all over the world. Digital health is the convergence of the Digital and Genomic Revolutions with health, healthcare, living, and society.

Super Ten Health Technologies

There are ten drivers of technology that make up the Super Ten healthcare drivers that, when used, smartly transform or even disrupt how healthcare is delivered today.

AI, Robotics & Drones  

By applying current best practice and self-learned heuristics, AI tools can analyze vast amounts of unorganized data sitting in disconnected silos and leverage the resulting information and insights to personalize clinical interventions and patient engagement. For example, I can ensure we do not send a reminder for a mammogram to a patient already undergone a double mastectomy. Or we can personalize the chemotherapy drug based on the genomic data of the patient. AI can have an intelligent conversation with a patient who is worried about some new symptom he/she is facing.  

IoT

Today’s smart devices and appliances interconnected with sophisticated health systems drive real-time analytics, remote 24/7 care monitoring and tracking patients, inventory, assets, and staff. They enable point of care diagnostics,  digital stethoscopes, Insulin pumps, emergency drones, and drug dispensing.

noSQL

Hyper-fast super large databases that build intra-database and cross-application reference data models on the fly, connect patient lifelong records to point-of-care, and evidence-based clinical care flows. These make it possible to standardize /improve care providers’ outcomes and availability.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality systems deliver an Intelligent, dynamic, interactive and intuitive platform for a more immersive education for the patient, physicians, caregivers, and social workers. This can dramatically and positively impact the desired change and allow for the ability to deploy untrained ordinary citizens and family members to emergency and wellness care, thus freeing up the experts for more critical or urgent tasks.

Identity Management

Facial recognition, biometric scanning, and sophisticated encryption technologies work together to ensure secure data access to authorized agents. They enable us to capture and accumulate disparate data on our eating habits and lifestyle and nudge us to make meaningful behavioral changes.

Social Networks

The universal adoption and ease of use of social networking platforms make it very amenable to share and connect with multiple members of society in the comfort of their own space and time as opposed to the inflexible and restrictive availability of the current doctor appointment systems. Social networking platforms also enable collaboration with patient-like-me groups, search stats-based disease surveillance and general wellness and lifestyle coaching.

5G Mobile Telephony

Superfast mobile networks power more sophisticated, real-time, high bandwidth transmissions at blazingly fast speed. Smartphones, video conferencing, and remote sensing make healthcare available to us in the comfort of our homes and our beds instead of clinics and hospitals.

Genomics

Evidence-based and genomic-based Clinical Pathways are used in the clinical care of individual patients for diagnostic or therapeutic decision-making. Genomic information about an individual patient helps us understand illness at the molecular level and increases our ability to apply that knowledge to take precautionary actions to keep people healthy and better calibrate care for those who are ill. 

Big data analytics

Data lakes, big data processing, real-time metrics, and benchmarking deliver actionable insights on costs, outcomes, and safety at both population and individual levels.

SMART on FHIR

Finally, smart APIs running on a federated health interoperable record allows for an easier exchange of data and applications across multiple systems and build a single Intelligent Clinical decision support that is universal and untethered.

These ten technologies working together can build a very powerful digital health platform that not only transforms how healthcare is delivered but simultaneously frees it from the many prisons that confine our current health model.

Transformation From	Transformation To
Global	Local
Location-based	Home-based
Restricted access	24/7 access
Expert	Engaged
Episodic	Long- term
Specialized	Holistic
Generalized	Personalized
Sickness	Health
Interventionist	Nature
Prescriptive	Preventive

These are not as futuristic as we imagine and many of the applications listed above are already modified by a combination of the Super Ten health technologies, making a dramatic impact on our personal health management program. As these applications and the underlying technologies mature and spread, they will make us all live more comfortably longer than ever deemed possible in the entire history of humankind. In another 100 years perhaps, no child or mother would die at birth, all would live to be a 100 and disease would be altogether eliminated. Today, the Super Ten bring the best of technology harmonized in novel ways for the first time, transforming modern care into a more holistic, personalized, affordable, convenient, and glorious future. 

About the Author 

Udai Kumar, Chairman & CEO, OHUM Healthcare Solutions, is a highly successful serial entrepreneur, mentor, and investor. Udai has a deep understanding of the global delivery model and specialized in global business development, human capital management, finance, software development, Six Sigma, systems & processes. He is an member of the Health Information Network group and is on the panel of Leadership Team at the Government of India level for healthcare technology. He is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/_udaikumar