Name: Is big tech good for your health? | The Economist
Uploaded: 2020-07-15T23:49:31.000Z
Duration: 12 min 46 s
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Health care is in the midst of a digital revolution

Patient records that have been digitised, gene sequences...

...medical images, lab tests, and then of course there's the sensors that...

...we're increasingly wearing on our bodies, whether they're Fitbits...

...or maybe just your own mobile phone that you carry around with you

Now some of the tech companies that made those devices...

...are eyeing up the data they're collecting

Microsoft and Walgreens in a seven-year deal...

...and it includes up to 12 digital-health centres

Alphabet, the owner of Google, has made an offer to acquire Fitbit

These companies have made vast fortunes from processing...

Today they're turning those talents to health care

You need to record at least ten finger movements...

...and combined with those data it will give you the score

This app is designed to monitor a patient's Parkinson's disease...

...just by using the camera on a smartphone

This is a test that, traditionally, you're doing it in...

...a health-care setting in front of a neurologist

It's been created by a tech startup called Medopad

With a phone like this, I can measure my resting heart rate

I can measure and do a test for Parkinson's, a test for Alzheimer's

...so that doctors know when to intervene...

...rather than waiting for the patient to come to them

We think there's a new category in medicine...

...which is based on all the data that your body generates

And the whole idea and our focus is to see...

...can we find signatures that quantify your health...

...quantify different diseases you might be dealing with

These invisible footprints are called digital biomarkers

And you're leaving them wherever you go...

...through watches, wearable technology and smartphones

There are already thousands of diagnostic and monitoring applications...

...targeting a host of different conditions and diseases

This digital-biomarker category, probably...

...it will have the biggest impact in medicine...

...because of the amount of data it's going to generate

Combined the digital biomarkers produce...

...big and potentially very valuable datasets

Factor in the vast volume of data already generated by health-care systems...

...in the daily effort to look after patients and populations...

...and there's the potential to improve outcomes on a far bigger scale

There's a whole bunch of things you can do...

...just with a much broader and deeper view of a patient...

You can pick up medical errors, for example...

...and you can also figure out which pathways of care are most efficient

It's only by assembling lots of patient-health data that you start to see...

...what spending is useful and what spending isn't

But in many health systems, what you find is you have pools...

...of medical data in different places. And it's not until you link these up...

...that you can really wring out the power that they have...

...to kind of give you really wonderful insights

....enables patterns and trends to be spotted

...and the evidence suggests that many countries have a long way to go

Health-care systems have been quite slow...

...in using modern technologies to revolutionise themselves

Some people say that they're about ten years behind other sectors

In 2017 the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries...

...judged how ready its members are for a revolution in health tech

It looked at two factors: technological readiness...

...meaning digitised records that can already be used...

...and policy, the extent to which governments facilitate...

...the use of the data in these digitised records

Some countries, like Slovakia, have the technology ready...

...but are held back by government lagging

Others, like Poland, have more policy in place but less technology ready

...have a high proportion of health datasets digitised...

...only a small percentage of them are regularly linked...

Take Singapore. Although all of its key national-health datasets are available...

...just under a third are linked, making vast quantities of data redundant

The reason most OECD country health systems don't...

...clean up their datasets, or at least that they haven't so far...

...is really that the data that exists in the health-care system...

...it's not really there for this purpose

The point of it is to look after human beings in the moment

Inefficiencies in health services, and failure to make full use...

...of digital technologies, mean that rich countries...

That's around 8% of current health spending...

...and more than the equivalent of the GDP of Sweden

At a time when all of the OECD health-care systems...

...are struggling under a burden of increasingly old patients...

...lower amounts of money flowing into the system

There's just not a lot of money there to do...

...the kind of digital reorganisation that is needed

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Is big tech good for your health? | The Economist

potential

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