Singularity University‘s executive director of FutureMed Daniel Kraft M.D. recently talked with Josh Constine at Tech Crunch about the future of medicine. Constine Breaks down six big ideas that were outlined at the Practice Fusion conference.
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| Daniel Kraft |
1. Artificial Intelligence
Now that Watson has decimated the competition on Jeopardy!, IBM has announced that its services will be re-tasked to function as a medical assistance service. Costine also mentions apps like Skin Scan that are aleady available to diagnose skin lesions via the cloud.
2. Big Data
Genomics and proteomics data processing have already shown to be progressing at faster-than-exponential rates. It cost a billion dollars ten years ago to get a complete human gene sequence. Now the price is less than $5000 and dropping. Data creation in medicine is not a problem today, but in the future developing methods and techniques of making the data usable will definately change medicine.
3. 3D Printing
3D printing is integrating with the fast-moving world of stem cells and regenerative medicine with 3D ink being replaced by stem cells. In the future we’ll probably use 3D printing and stem cells to make libraries of replacement parts. It will start with simple tissues and eventually maybe we’ll be printing organs.
4. Social Networks for Health
When your wireless weight scale shares metrics with your friends, you get praised for success and pressured if you’re not maintaining your diet. Social networks are also quite powerful for tracking and predicting disease. James Fowler, co-author of the book Connected is now working with Facebook to look at health data. Not surprisingly, the more friends you have, the earlier in the flu season you’ll get influenza. This could help predict when you’ll get the flu and let you take steps to avoid it.
5. Communication Improvements
The challenge is often not the technology but the regulatory and reimbursement markets around them. If you’re going to be talking with your clinician on your iPhone you may need to do that in a HIPAA privacy protected way. The physician is also going to want to be paid for that in some way. They’re not going to want to get all your data every time you have a hiccup or look at your iPhone pictures of your rash unless there’s a way to get paid.
6. Mobile Medicine
More and more diagnosis and monitoring will take place on mobile devices. ventually these devices will converge into the equivalent of Star Trek tricorder that can perform a wide variety of medical functions. There’s even an $10 million X Prize proposed to reward the inventor of the first functional tricorder.
Tech Crunch
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