This was said by Dr Jonathan Broomberg, CEO of Discovery Health, in a presentation to journalists in Johannesburg last week on how the digital revolution is transforming medicine.
He said new technology could empower patients to take responsibility for their health and enable doctors and caregivers to intervene almost instantly via individual wearable (or ingestible) automatic devices that monitored and transmitted in real time anything from the gut biome, heart-rate, stress and insulin levels, to the amount of movement or its absence.
Algorithms enabling “machine learnings,” already allowed computers to crunch this tsunami of streamed data into accurate diagnoses within seconds, supporting doctors to personalise and speed-up treatment. These data-rich innovations, led by non-healthcare companies like Google and Amazon, would enable clinicians to discover patterns and causes of diseases, plus predict longevity, in ways, ‘’we have no idea about today”.
The approach of most modern doctors was a far cry from universal treatment based on medical textbooks where everybody was treated the same way a mere 10 years ago. The digital revolution and its attendant device-connectivity was already decreasing preventable hospital admissions, predicting health and resulting in early interventions when warning signs appeared. Broomberg gave the example of sensors installed in an elderly person’s bed, toilet, fridge and front door (besides wearables and/or ‘ingestibles’), enabling a connected caregiver to monitor anything unusual.
Impact of Mayo Clinic heart app
The cutting-edge Mayo Clinic, based in the United States, was already producing research on a wearable app for heart failure patients that had reduced such hospital admissions by 40%.
Discovery Health was using its own Vitality member data (300 000 active members) to predict a patients’ probability of developing new chronic condition or progressing to a worse disease stage, while financially incentivising doctors to consult for longer – and improve their own lifestyles. Active Vitality members were shown to have an 11% lower mortality risk, while those who did five workouts per week had a 35% lower risk of death, according to the data.
A Google-inspired algorithm developed by Stanford University could today diagnose a skin melanoma (cancerous or pre-cancerous) from a single photograph- with the same accuracy as a certified dermatologist, taking about 15 seconds instead of the usual 15-minute face-to-face consultation.
