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Health care revolution will shift, reimagine medicine
ATLANTA – A big part of the change in health care will be in redefining where health care happens, Daniel Kraft, MD, physician-scientist and inventor and entrepreneur in clinical practice, biomedical research and health care innovation, said at MedPro 360, prior to SECO.
Currently, providers are too often reactive in health care, he said.
“What if we used new technologies that are in our pocket and emerging to yield continuous and more proactive care that covered every system of the body?” Kraft asked.
Today, a patient waits an average of 65 minutes for a 12-minute primary care visit, he said. He believes practitioners have an opportunity to reshape that.
“We spend 80% of our health care dollar on 20% of the population; we need to shift this,” he continued.
“Increasingly the incentives are to push patients out of hospitals and into a pharmacy or to one’s home or to apps and resources on their phone,” he said. “The technology is shifting to where health care happens, and that has huge implications.”
The incentives and technology are blending to enable these shifts, Kraft added. With websites like Yelp and Republica, a patient can compare hospital reviews and score surgeons. With GoodRx.com a patient can compare prescription prices among pharmacies.
Iodine.com shares patient reviews on how various medications are working for them.
It was only 10 years ago that the iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs, and it launched in the summer of 2007, he said.
“How will the iPhone 10 or 12 leverage optometry and other health professions?” he asked.
The pace of change for technology is exponential.
The “Internet of health care” is how medical devices and wearable devices will make sense of that data in powerful and surprising ways, he continued.
“Connected health, mobile health or the digitalization of health care allows us to organize a lot of information that used to be siloed, filed or in piles of paper – to bring it together in impactful ways,” Kraft added.
“We are still in the early stages of this revolution, but it really provides us with a major opportunity to shift and reimagine medicine,” he said.
Other technologies such as 3-D printing, robotics and augmented reality will converge and reinvent many fields including the challenges we have across health care, such as cost, access to care and an aging population, he said.
Apps such as Uber have connected the dots and disrupted cabs. Just 10 years ago, Uber could not have existed; its technology is disruptive and exponential, he said.
The “uberization of health care” is helping patients get to clinics, Kraft said.
A New York City pilot program, Uber Health, brings a nurse to give the flu shot.
“That’s disruptive,” he said.
Zipdrug.com brings prescriptions to your door in less than an hour.
“Now there are these five apps where a doctor comes to you,” he said. “You press a button; the program takes your insurance information, and a doctor comes to you.”
“Change is happening, and none of you want to be the next Kodak, Blockbuster or Blackberry,” he said.
In this world of change, we need to think of how to become the next disruptor, not the disruptee in health care, Kraft said. – by Abigail Sutton
Reference:
Kraft D. The future of health and medicine: Where can technology take us? Presented at: MedPro 360; March 1, 2017; Atlanta.
Disclosure: Kraft is the inventor of the MarrowMiner, an FDA-approved device for minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow, and founded RegenMed Systems, a company developing technologies to enable adult stem cell-based regenerative therapies.