The Future Of Healthcare

Healthcare is changing. It was changing before the pandemic. Everything changes as it is the nature of things to change in some manner. The questions become what will the change bring? It was not that long ago those doctors made house calls now they are virtual visits. Today’s hospitals were known as sanatoriums. Places that you really did not wanted to go to get better. Geriatric medicine and interventional radiology became identified as specialties in the latter half of the twentieth century. The idea of an electronic medical record was a dream being worked and developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Telemedicine was talked about for decades with limited use until this past year. So where will healthcare go from here?

Before we venture into the future, perhaps we could benefit from a ride done memory lane. A look back to the last twenty years finds advances in vaccines, surgical techniques, the mapping of the human genome, and drug developments for treatments in cardiology, oncology, neurology, rheumatology, Hepatitis C, HIV and more. If the advancements in medicine and healthcare were placed in comparison to the known history of mankind, you would likely occurred in the last 100 years. Changes have not only come across in technology, pharmaceuticals, techniques, but in the administration of services.

"THANKS TO THE PANDEMIC, SOME THINGS ARE BEING ACCELERATED SUCH AS TELEMEDICINE VIDEO VISITS AND THE SPEED OF APPROVAL FOR VACCINES THAT DID NOT EXIST 18 MONTHS AGO"

In the last five years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved an approximate 50 novel drugs each year. Already in the first two months of 2021, the FDA has approved four new novel drugs. It is difficult for the clinician to stay current with all of the new developments in pharmaceuticals alone. Doctors used to have to contend with patients having read the latest Reader’s Digest or Good Housekeeping article presenting with a new aliment. Today, healthcare apps for cell phones are in the thousands and available to the public. These apps pose new challenges to the physician as patients come in with self-diagnosis which is not always appropriate. New surgical tools and techniques such as the DaVinci machine and minimally invasive surgical techniques have drastically improved both survival rates and recovery times, but these require additional training to stay current and proficient.

On the administrative front, billing and collection for services have changed greatly. Health insurance did not always exist. It came about in the early 1900s and rapidly evolved to make good healthcare more affordable to everyone, but it was not until the 1960s that government sponsored health care coverage became a catalyst to fund specialty services and fund significant innovation. With government involvement came the demand for additional information, computerization of records and then the subsequent demand for privacy and government regulations.

Thanks to the pandemic, some things are being accelerated such as telemedicine video visits and the speed of approval for vaccines that did not exist 18 months ago. The patient will notice the new drugs, the new technology, and perhaps will find some new self-diagnostic tools. To the clinician and administrator of healthcare, the changes are even more noticeable. With all of this what does the future hold? Will doctors and hospitals exist?

The answer is of course they will exist but, a visit with the doctor or a medical procedure will likely be very different. Employing the concepts of the use of Nano technology, artificial intelligence, electronic ink and a scanning app on your cell phone. What can this blend of technology create? If you add a paper hazmat suit into the mix; apply the ink in a grid format on the suit with a designer pill and a designed app, you have the potential for a full body scan that is done in privacy of your home or perhaps a focused scan using the nanotech pill that is programmed to target a specific organ or locate a specific concern such as lymphoma cancer. Apps already exist that you can use your phone to take your blood pressure or your blood sugars. Add the artificial intelligence to automatically change your prescriptions and have them ordered to be shipped directly to you.

The DaVinci robot opened the potential of robotic surgery. Now combine robotics, virtual reality, haptic feedback and the internet so that a specialist in Boston could perform a surgical procedure in on a patient in the jungles of Brazil. There is a growing potential of a holodeck where a combination of laser produced graphic images and video-based interaction could generate a real experience to test, practice, and perfect new techniques. Today’s three-dimensional printers can have synthetic tissue material that could potentially create genetically compatible organs.

With robotic processing and artificial intelligence, the complex billing systems that we deal with today will be simplified into an understandable bill that is automatically handled by your insurance coverage. The need for pre-approvals, validation of coverage, and validation of clinical credentials will be handled in seconds long before scheduling for the procedure may even be discussed.

Are these things something from Star Trek or perhaps the cartoon, The Jetsons. Well, they certainly could be. Science Fiction writers have tended to dream and come up with things we would never think possible. Just like the first generational readers of Dick Tracy cartoon never thought of using a watch to have a video conference would be possible, we may have difficulty thinking home base surgery will never happen. There is nothing wrong with dreaming the impossible.