How Tech Companies Are Changing Our Healthcare System [Infographic]

Edgar Wilson http://healthinformatics.uic.edu 3m 729 #technology

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

Modern medicine is going through a revolution. Like every other aspect of modern life, healthcare is going digital, spawning a whole new toolkit for doctors and patients everywhere. Perhaps more importantly, care givers are using these emerging informatics disciplines to make healthcare more personal—and more effective. After all, using the wrong tool at the wrong time can make things worse than before, no matter how sophisticated the tool.

As the following infographic from the University of Illinois at Chicago shows, modern healthcare has incredible power and science behind it, but tends to work as a blunt instrument instead of a precise tool. The field of Healthcare Informatics is beginning to change that trend.

From identifying the problem to accommodating personal preferences, the future of medicine is in customization. More than just a technological breakthrough, there is a shift in philosophy behind the change, where patients are more than statistics, and outcomes truly matter.

Patients will no longer be lumped into broad groups, and instead, they will finally receive personalized healthcare, considering everything from their medical history to their genetic sequence. Digital record-keeping will improve conversations, diagnosis, and even communication between hospital departments. Most importantly, patients will be able to feel the full benefit of modern medicine. They can look forward to less trial-and-error and more effective treatment from the beginning.

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HOW TECH COMPANIES ARE CHANGING OUT HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

Personalized healthcare is “health care that is informed by each person’s unique clinical, genetic, and environmental information.” – AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION

PERSONALIZED HEALTHCARE INVOLVES:
A MOVE AWAY FROM THE ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL APPROACH TO HEALTH CARE

• pharmacogeniomics
• epigenomics
• proteomics
• genetics
• liver-enzyme tests
• biomarker scans
• metabonomics
• genometics

TRADITIONAL HEALTHCARE IS FLAWED BECAUSE IT DOESN’T HELP EVERY PATIENT

• Most prescription drugs only work for half of the people they’re prescribed to.
• Depression medications offer relief to around six out of ten patients.
• Cancer drugs are effective for just a quarter of patients.
• The two most commonly prescribed drugs for fibromyalgia offer “substantial improvement” for just two in ten sufferers.
• ADHD medication is effective for around one in ten diagnosed preschoolers.

Personalized healthcare helps us move toward providing:

• the right patient
• the right drug
• the right dose
• at the right time

66% Two-thirds of people would prefer to follow a personalized healthcare regime which considers their genetic biological profile.

“Personalized medicine will dramatically change health care, how we get health care, what we need, diagnostics, everything that we do. That to me will be the next earth-shattering impact on the world.” – MARK CUBAN, AMERICAN INVESTOR

WHICH KEY TECH COMPANIES ARE ALSO IN PERSONALIZED HEALTHCARE?

April 2013
Intel Corp joins forces with Oregon Health & Science University to improve the speed of genomic analysis.

Research will initially be focused on comparing the genomes of cancer patients and healthy individuals, with a view to isolating genetic abnormalities and better understanding cancer.

Panasonic announces it’s developed a DNA testing chip with Belgian research institutions IMEC.

The chip can read all relevant genetic information from a drop of blood.

May 2013
IBM works with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in order to help the IBM Watson system understand cancer.

“It’s going to be the ultimate personalized medicine because it is going to be able to learn more facts about you than any one doctor or health-care system can, and can process them in a way that will ultimately be useful to your care” – Dr. Mark Kris

June 2013
Dell launches Active Infrastructure for High-Performance Computing Life Sciences, a platform to help medical researchers collect, store, and analyze large-scale sets of genomic data.

It can process up to 38 genomes every day.

September 2013
Foundation Medicine, which sells a $5,800 test that analyzes the DNA of cancer patients, launches on stock market.

Google and Bill Gates are two of its major investors.

December 2013
The Samsung Genomics Research Institute of Samsung Medical Center spearheads large-scale cancer genomics research.

Dutch startup Genalice launches software which analyzes a human genome in 25 minutes.

The first human genome sequencing took 13 years to complete.

January 2014
Sony forms genome research company P5 Inc with medical compnay M3 & genome-sequencing equipment firm Illumina.

This “genome information platform” will provide genome analysis services and collate genetic information with other medical data.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

UIC UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO

Source: How Tech Companies Are Changing Our Healthcare System

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