Let me talk, share some thoughts, some observations about why I’m incredibly optimistic about
the future of health care.
We often pick up our newspapers and read the most doom and gloom about the way the health
care situation is today.
Apparently one in five of us cannot get the appointments we need, one in eight get misdiagnosed
and of those of us who get diagnosed and treated apparently anything between 10,000 to 20,000
of us die every year because of avoidable mistakes.
If you now compare that to what happens in developing countries the situation is far,
far more severe.
70 per cent of human race of the world population have no meaningful access to health care.
So why am I so optimistic about the future of healthcare?
Because I think four things are happening and are coming for the first time in human
history together that will melt everything that is solid into air and will reconstruct
a kind of health care that will be fundamentally different.
What are those four?
One, diagnostic is becoming almost free.
Only ten years ago it would have cost me $1 million to do top to toe diagnostics.
Today I can do that including my genome sequencing for about $10,000.
99 per cent reduction in costs in front of our eyes in the last ten years and that is
nothing to compare to what is about to come our way.
There is a barrage of apps, diagnostic tools, developments in micro fluids that is going
to change everything we understand about diagnostics.
I give you some basic examples.
Scanadu is coming up with a device shortly, I think at the end of October, you put it
in your head it diagnoses and picks up about ten different vital signs from you.
A company called Q is coming up with another device apparently next year that collects
a bit of bodily fluid from you and it’s almost a lab in your pocket.
I was at Liverpool University the other day and looked at a little gadget they have that
they put in front of your phone and it analyses your breath as you speak for 50 different
diseases.
Secondly, information is already free for everybody.
All of us, whether we are doctors or not, we have access to the entire knowledge of
mankind, humankind on our mobile phones.
We now have a whole source of symptom checkers that have come out there and are enabling
us to figure out things a lot easier but, more importantly, patients now, through various
social platforms, can talk to each other.
I was talking to a doctor, it wasn’t as far away as a year ago, in Bangalore who was
saying, ‘I’m fed up with my patients coming through the door saying, “Why are you treating
me this way when I talked recently to somebody on a platform on a social network who has
exactly my disease in Boston and is being treated completely differently?”’
All our children now in their almost free devices have the most powerful chess games
available to them.
There isn’t a human being alive who can beat today a machine in chess and for those
who think that’s awful that it replaces the doctors I don’t think it does at least
for anytime soon, but remember for those who have nothing, for the 70 per cent of the world
population who have no access to doctors it provides a free, cheap, easy alternative and
we should celebrate it.
Thirdly, it is rare the human being today who is not on a mobile platform or doesn’t
have one but what they have today is almost nothing compared to what they will have shortly.
Our mobile phones are developing at a rate of…doubling the rate of the capability every
year.
That means what they have today is only 50 per cent of what they will have next year
but only 3 per cent of what they will have in five years’ time and it’s not just
about mobile phones anymore, it’s variable devices perhaps embeddable devices, devices
are going to be freely available in every aspect of our life that will enable us to
collect the information, see our signs, analyse them, use bio-algorithms to give us results
on those.
Finally our intervention in health care, I wouldn’t even begin to talk how we can intervene
now.
If you look at every area of advance from nanotechnologies to laser manipulation, to
you just name it we can now intervene on diseases in a way or we will soon be able to intervene
on diseases in a way we’ve never done before.
Whether you are an evolutionist or a creationist the one thing that we all now have to agree
is that for the first time in human history through synthetic biology we can create new
forms of life.
We can recreate organs, we can build things that we could never build before.