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T H E D O W N L O A D : W H AT W E L E A R N T AT W I R E D H E A LT H
Innovation and disruptive technologies are moving forward at pace, which is making a real impact on the world as we know it. But healthcare systems, especially in the UK, are notoriously slow in adopting and implementing innovations.
There is a real need to do things differently in the healthcare sector. Money needs to be used more effectively to create head room for innovations which deliver value in clinical outcomes and improve patient experience. Embracing change is becoming urgent as demand is already out stripping supply.
Events like Wired Health are an important opportunity to be inspired by innovations which have the promise to revolutionise healthcare and to be amazed by disruptive trends which are changing the rules about how we manage our wellness. This Download is intended to give people who weren’t able to make the event a glimpse into some of the innovations which were showcased during the day.
For me, this year’s Wired Health focused on how some of the promising innovations of the recent past are now making a direct impact in the scientific and healthcare world. The event featured ideas which are no longer brand new, but which are building a track record of having an impact and are being implemented.
Wired Health was also an opportunity for me to reflect on how we, at MHP Communications, are supporting organisations who want to operate in this complex, highly regulated and evolving sector.
We understand where traditional healthcare companies are coming under threat from new types of competition and can advise them on how to evolve their business model so that they don’t get left behind. And we know the barriers that technology companies face when talking to, engaging with, and driving adoption of an innovation in the healthcare system.
At MHP we help innovators of all types to navigate the healthcare ecosystem and make perfect sense of health.
I N T R O D U C T I O NR AC H E L R OWS O NHead of Health Innovation
T H E D O W N L O A D : W H AT W E L E A R N T AT W I R E D H E A LT H
With the fourth industrial revolution upon us, technology is bringing together the physical, digital and biological worlds. Healthcare is being reimagined in light of scientific and technological change. This is disrupting entrenched relationships and creating a new breed of stakeholders operating in the healthcare sector.
Advancement of technology and data is enabling a shift of power away from the established players. Pamela Spence from EY said “medicine used to be a clinical science supported by data. We are moving to a system where medicine is becoming a data science supported by clinicians.”
Data is the key to fast-forwarding our progress, but we need a platform technology to create a ubiquitous interface across the health system to unlock the potential of data. This means that in the future the established healthcare players need to collaborate – at least in the short-term – in an agile way with partners they wouldn’t normally engage with. But, except in small pockets, cultural mismatch is stopping this from happening.
As people become more engaged in their own healthcare and become more like consumers, the need to put the patient at the centre of the data system is more important than ever. We need to be able to connect, combine and share data and to learn from other sectors, such as financial services, where an external body hosts data, but it is owned by the individual.
However, privacy and security are road blocks in enabling this to happen as health is highly regulated. Regulators face a huge challenge of keeping up with innovation. People working in the health sector have a role to play in keeping the regulators up-to-date so they know what the future context could look like and move more rapidly to support this.
The need to put the patient at the centre of the data system is more important than ever.
A N E W H E A LT H P A R A D I G M U S I N G A N A LT O G E T H E R D I F F E R E N T S C I E N C E
T H E D O W N L O A D : W H AT W E L E A R N T AT W I R E D H E A LT H
Dr Shafi Ahmed has been at the forefront of a revolution in surgical education and training. As part of traditional medical training, students would crowd in to an operating theatre, trying to watch an operation and learn their craft, with restricted views and in uncomfortable conditions. But this is no longer necessary with the use of augmented reality (AR), and more recently virtual reality (VR).
In 2014, nearly 14,000 people, from 113 countries tuned in to his first operation performed using Google Glass, giving a surgeon’s eye view of a liver cancer removal operation. This allowed viewers to ask Dr Ahmed questions live, which he could respond to in the moment.
In 2016, he performed an operation with a 360° camera rig set up in the operating theatre to capture every moment from every angle. This was livestreamed globally in VR and could be accessed by medical students or those interested in seeing what an operation is really like inside the operating theatre. This was enabled by the Medical Realities app (the AR and VR company set up by Dr Ahmed) and a Google Cardboard to turn a smartphone into a VR headset.
Later the same year, he broadcast a simple hernia operation via 10 second clips, taken through Snapchat Spectacles, which was turned into a training tutorial. Ashton Kutcher tweeted about this creative approach, which helped it to achieve 2 million views, 100,000 YouTube downloads and 5,000 snapchat students.
• Scarcity – in the number of qualified surgeons to learn from
• Access – through physical proximity
• Time – including the number of cases which can be studied in any training course
He has cleverly used technology to democratise surgical training around the world.
R E V O L U T I O N I S I N G M E D I C A L E D U C AT I O N I N A D I F F E R E N T R E A L I T Y
By using technology and existing social media platforms, Dr Ahmed is tackling some of the key challenges in medical education:
T H E D O W N L O A D : W H AT W E L E A R N T AT W I R E D H E A LT H
Sea Hero Quest has been played for 80 years by 3 million people, generating 12,000 years of research.
Have you ever wanted to help tackle one of societies biggest health challenges, but felt that this is the exclusive domain of scientists and researchers? Computer gaming is one of the areas where we are seeing a rise in ‘citizen science’ and are using the power of the population to fast forward our understanding of diseases like dementia. With new understanding about the progression of dementia, specialists now consider this to be a disease of middle age, which presents in old age.
Michael Hornberger is a Professor of Dementia Research and co-creator of the computer game Sea Hero Quest, which is a research project designed to gather data on navigation strategies. A player uses their navigation skills to steer a little boat around the sea. It is a fun game to play, and it is collecting scientifically valid data about navigation strategies.
How we get from one point to another is important in dementia because researchers have identified that patients have a specific problem with this. Being able to identify when navigation skills significantly decline could be a useful sign of dementia and enable earlier diagnosis. However, there is no existing baseline data to see what normal or healthy navigation is like, especially in the older population. To gather this baseline data Sea Hero Quest was born.
For every two minutes that a person plays the game, it generates the same amount of data that it would take 5 hours to collect in lab based research. To date Sea Hero Quest has been played for 80 years by 3 million people, generating 12,000 years of research.
The findings to date have changed our understanding of the populations navigation skills. There are age, gender and geographical differences in performance, and it has pinpointed that everyone’s navigation skills decline after the age of 19.
The aspiration is that using navigation as a key factor in dementia diagnosis could help to bring this forward by 10 years, compared to waiting for memory loss symptoms.
So, the little boat being steered around on your smart phone or VR headset could be the most significant breakthrough in our understanding of, and ability to turn the tide in, dementia.
U S I N G C O M P U T E R G A M I N G T O S U P P O R T E A R L I E R D E M E N T I A D I A G N O S I S
T H E D O W N L O A D : W H AT W E L E A R N T AT W I R E D H E A LT H
We all know that we are drowning in data in the healthcare sector and, according to BenevolentBio, these data are the key to speeding up drug discovery at scale.
Despite living in this age of data we haven’t necessarily been getting smarter, especially in the way that we try to innovate in the development of medicines. The traditional model, which has barely changed in the last 50 years, narrows the field of interrogation very quickly and considers drugs and diseases in a confined way.
Most biological knowledge is locked away in reports, scientific papers, intellectual property, and patent information.It’s impossible for humans alone to know and process all the available scientific information which can assist in drug discovery. Therefore, in the traditional drug discovery model significant amounts of time and money are spent on the cost of failure.
But companies like BeneloventBio are harnessing technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the efficiency of drug discovery. Their platform enables scientists to draw previously impossible connections from millions of pieces of information and unstructured text. This is translated into insight and intelligence which can be applied to the drug development process, helping to identify a pipeline of drug candidates which are more likely to be successful.
AI seems to have the power to help change the odds in drug discovery, by making this a quicker, cheaper, and more successful process. However, to unlock this power there is still a need for highly trained scientists and clinicians to pose the right questions to this technology platform, to drive forward smarter drug discovery.
H O W A R T I F I C I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E I S D I S R U P T I N G B I G P H A R M A
T H E D O W N L O A D : W H AT W E L E A R N T AT W I R E D H E A LT H
We have all had times where we aren’t feeling well or we are worried about our health, and we have turned to Google to try and find a diagnosis for our symptoms. While this can be helpful in self-managing low level illnesses, it is also a blunt tool because everyone is unique and Google alone is not able to cross reference a search with your medical history or other relevant information.
To fill this void between internet searches and going to see a doctor in the traditional way, a whole raft of ‘personal health companions’ have been launched. One of these platforms, which was showcased at Wired Health, is Ada.
Ada is a mobile phone based app which uses a conversational interface to identify symptoms and determine what their cause may be. Unlike a simple internet search, each consultation with Ada takes your previous medical history, symptoms and risk factors in to account before providing information about the potential cause and then advising on suitable next steps.
Ada doesn’t have the same time pressures as a GP. The app can help people to get more sophisticated suggestions of a diagnosis than from a general internet search. It can also support people who wouldn’t otherwise engage with the healthcare system, through fear or embarrassment. In a time where money in the health service is tight and there aren’t enough resources to go around, the value of a system like Ada is clear.
As Ada builds up more knowledge of an individual person, and through interacting with the full cohort of people using the service, it learns and builds more sophisticated knowledge to apply in the future. To make Ada even more user friendly it is also compatible with Alexa, so you can have a conversation through a voice interface as well as via the phone app.
T H E A R T I F I C I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E P E R S O N A L H E A LT H C O M P A N I O N
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