Where next for personalised healthcare?
Hi there,
Over the past few weeks I spent some time in Austin, Texas, at this year’s SXSW. It was my first time in Austin (what a city!) and was in town to host a conversation on some of the most exciting areas of innovation in healthcare, with colleagues from Stanford, Oracle and the Tony Blair Institute. (Quick snap with my brilliant colleagues and the SXSW backdrop below!)
This week’s newsletter covers a handful of the takeaways from our session. Innovation is moving so quickly in healthcare and data - we’re living longer, with more information about our health - yet there’s a lot of work to do in helping people maximise insights into their health, and enable doctors and medical systems to incorporate this data in service of better treatment.
There’s an extended version of this blog - and a range of related reports on this theme - over on the TBI website.
—
We’re living longer, but not necessarily healthier - leading to major pressure on our health systems.
While we’ve seen notable increases in life expectancy globally over the past century, the proportion of life spent in good health has not increased at the same pace. People are now living longer – but they’re not necessarily living healthier. This is a major challenge for public health systems and the broader economic model in advanced economies, where the costs of treating chronic illness are already sizeable – and set to increase. Advances in technology and data have real potential in helping us get a better understanding of our health, preventing or delaying the onset of disease, and allowing us to enjoy our extra years.
Wearable biosensors will deliver personalised health diagnostics at scale.
Wearables are becoming increasingly ubiquitous – with over one in five Americans using a smart watch or fitness tracker. They can be hugely helpful in establishing personal baselines of health, with users then alerted when their health deviates from their personal standard ranges – an approach that has been particularly valuable in enabling people to detect infectious illnesses like COVID days before symptoms emerge.
Yet our audience polling from SXSW shows there’s a range in terms of how much insight people have into their personal health right now – from 18 per cent who feel they have a good level of insight, right through to 9 per cent of respondents who have little visibility into their personal health data.
By increasing the quality, and frequency of personal health measurements patients have a new opportunity to move away from average population data and increase their own understanding of their personal health - and their ability to predict the onset of diseases when there are deviations from their baselines.
Question: How much insight do you have into your personal health data right now?
Source: SXSW live panel polling, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Routine low-cost genomic sequencing will soon be here – helping to identify and mitigate our susceptibility to disease.
Our genetic makeup can significantly increase or reduce our chances of developing specific diseases and understanding our unique genomic profile can help us predict and prevent those diseases we are predisposed to. Rapid advancements in next generation sequencing technologies have made it possible to sequence an entire human genome in a matter of hours, for just ~$1,000, giving people insights into genetic variants that can lead to, or increase the risk of, disease, thereby enabling them to act preemptively. With the cost of genomic sequencing set to fall even further, it is likely that it will become a regular part of preventative healthcare over the coming five to ten years. Yet, challenges remain over how to incorporate and leverage sequencing results in clinical care - from how the data is integrated and accessed in the patient record, to the expertise needed to interpret and make it actionable.
We’re on the cusp of an explosion in healthcare data, with huge opportunities for clinical innovation.
The increase in wearables, genetic sequencing and other big data sources promised over the coming decade will unleash even more healthcare data – with important opportunities for these insights to transform clinical care. Customer consent will be an important part of this, and our live audience polling shows that a high proportion of respondents would be willing to share their healthcare data with researchers and professionals.
Question: Would you be willing to share your personal health data with health professionals, the Department of Health & Human Services, and academic researchers?
Source: SXSW live panel polling, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
This new wave of data will also continue to drive the need for interoperable, scalable, cost-efficient data management solutions capable of enabling AI/ML, such as cloud infrastructure and data lakehouses. These cloud-based solutions also facilitate collaboration and sharing of public health data across borders, which has grown in importance since the onset of the pandemic. One such example is the Global Pathogen Analysis System, which allows scientists from countries across the globe to share and compare COVID sequencing data to identify and track variants.
Biobehavioural and lifestyle changes are essential in improving healthspans.
Is there a ‘low-tech’ solution to extending the healthy portion of life? Evidence shows the number one predictor of longevity is close relationships. Indeed, a Harvard study of adult development showed that close relationships are a better predictor of physical health than cholesterol. More broadly, the growing field of health coaching is focused on supporting people to change behaviours in diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management – all predictors of long-term health. Healthcare providers should seek to make support for this kind of behavioural change – and ‘speciality’ services like nutritionists and physical therapists – more accessible as a means of prevention.
Experience and skills that span data science and healthcare, such as bioinformatics, will be in high demand.
With our rapidly ageing population and growing focus on preventative healthcare, demand for those with interdisciplinary skills across data science and healthcare analytics is massively increasing. Experts in areas such as computational biology and bioinformatics will be increasingly valuable, and more work is needed to build a pipeline of talent with these specialist skills if we are to realise the opportunities that advances in biology and technology offer.
Digital health twins and continuous monitoring will be at the core of healthcare over the next decade.
When asked where the future will take us in healthcare, two key areas were highlighted. First, continuous monitoring – not just through wearables or remote monitoring devices, but through clothing and sensors in the rooms that we walk through. Second, digital health twins are set to become increasingly common for mapping individual disease susceptibility, drug development, and device testing, enabling personalised treatments to be developed with lower levels of patient risk. In both areas, the insights from the data will be translated into an actionable form for patients and providers, enabling proactive prevention instead of reactive intervention.
Health class disparities will likely increase too.
Despite the prospects for extending both healthspan and lifespan, there is a risk that the benefits of innovation in healthcare do not accrue equally across populations. Significant healthcare inequities already exist in our current systems with over 20-year differences in life expectancy reported between different areas of the UK in 2021, it will be increasingly critical that political leaders put new approaches to lifestyle change and data-driven healthcare at the centre of future healthcare reform.
This newsletter is a bit of an experiment - I’d love any feedback on the content! If you enjoyed it, please do subscribe or pass it on to a friend who might like it.