The 10 pillars of HealthTech

When the Covid crisis hit us, one industry caught totally off guard was healthcare. Since then it has caught up on a lot of factors with an eye firmly on the future. Technology is going to play a huge role in what path healthcare takes from hereon.

Looking at the various pillars that will hold up the new paradigm...

1. Collaboration: While collaboration has been around for ages, it is only after Covid that everyone upgraded their bandwidth and the tech industry offered a bouquet of services to cater to every need. The first obvious application of this is telemedicine which people were reluctant to use and now are being forced to do so. In many areas of the globe, legislation was an issue. But governments have now started waiving off restrictions to push telemedicine.

The middle classes have myriad devices like desktops, laptops and tabs to avail telemedicine. The poor can get a leg in thanks to the smartphone. The proliferation of the mobile in India’s rural areas has been unprecedented. For the first time almost every Indian family has a digital footprint along with a healthy bandwidth. Women are using apps to track their periods and pregnancies. It can be extended to almost any other medical condition you can think of.

It’s not just the doctor-patient paradigm, but the hospital ecosystem itself. Now all the hospitals, doctor residences and headquarters can be seamlessly connected. Doctors and medical experts can collaborate 24X7 to exchange ideas, opinions and heavy medical files, something that was difficult and expensive in the age when collaboration wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today.

2. Artificial Intelligence: It is difficult to imagine all the applications of AI in the medical industry. When you combine millions of X-rays, MRIs and lab reports with their expert diagnosis given by doctors; AI can learn from it and go beyond in the era of Machine Learning. With the right algorithms, AI can diagnose and advise on the future course of action. The final decision will be with the doctor. AI can prove to be a reliable and powerful data crunching medical assistant, which can introduce checks and balances.

An AI system could monitor an individual patient’s history. If all your data was on file and updated on a regular basis then the AI would be able to find patterns and predict if something could go wrong based on the latest data. Chatbots on medical sites could actually help in answering the basic queries of patients, eliminating basic doubts, making the job of the doctor easier, if and when he takes over in case it becomes serious.

AI can assess the risk of a new drug, sift through data; look at market research to finalize things like pricing and distribution. AI is being used in gene editing; the development of new drugs. AI will be able to quickly do comparative studies thereby looking at the effectiveness of various drugs, vaccines and devices.

AIs could be handy during pandemics. If there was a global AI system which had access to all the hospitals, labs, airports and train-bus systems, it could detect patterns which escaped the local authorities. Say all the facial recognition systems noticed a spike in certain kinds of sneezes and coughs across the world, a global AI could actually detect the coming of a pandemic and later suggest lockdown timetables for each part of the globe. It could monitor the highs and lows of the pandemic and when it was at a likely end.

3. Robotics: There are many aspects to this. You could have robotic receptionists at the entry of the hospital with assistants throughout. These robots can be trained to be much more patient with the patients and dispense medicine. They can be the first point of contact. If the patient is not satisfied he can move to a human contact. There can be robotic assistants to deliver material throughout the hospitals and labs. They can sanitize the premises. These robots cannot catch or transmit diseases, a boon in the Covid Era.

Robotic surgeons have taken off and are doing many activities that require fine precision like back surgeries. There is no reason why this can be extended to every kind of surgery slowly and steadily in the future. Again, they are not replacing the human surgeon, who will firmly remain in charge and be the supervisor. You could send robots to hazardous zones and remote areas. They could give basic care to patients and collaborate with a human doctor.

Exoskeleton robots can help patients with all kinds of paralysis. Once we master the mass production and cost of these, people who can’t walk or have paralyzed hands will be active throughout the world. Robots can be home nurses for those who require round the clock care. Robots can be trained to interact with depressed patients or those with autism.

4. Extended Reality: XR includes Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR, where the real world is also included) and Mixed Reality (MR, a mixture of both). Imagine if via XR, medical students could do unlimited studies and dissection on a host of different virtual bodies. Imagine a new surgeon performing surgery on a virtual patient multiple times before attempting it in real life. It is ideal for training and simulation.

VR headsets can help patients recovering from brain trauma. They can help patients in isolation, entertaining them and helping them interact with the outside world. VR has been found to be effective to distract patients from pain. They can be used to cure patients who have certain strong phobias via simulation. They can be used for virtual conferences which show 3D images of the body and other organs and processes.

5. 3D Printing: 3D printing has been used for making body parts like tissues, bone regrowths and dental implants. 3D printing has been used to make models that are specific to a patient under study. They can be used to make economical, precise and specialized prosthetics.

Overall they are more hygienic and can cater to the individual as against a mass production item which may not suit one and all. It has been used to make surgical tools, especially tiny specialized ones. In the future every body part and organ could potentially be made via 3D printing. During the Covid crisis, 3D printing was used in the making of PPE kits.

6. Wearable IoTs: These devices are getting more and more sophisticated with each passing day. They can track information on a real-time basis and transmit it to the family, doctor or hospital, as required. They can monitor heart rate, perspiration, temperature, sleep patterns and glucose (for diabetes patients). Connected with your car, the AC level could automatically be set based on these indicators. You can seamlessly monitor your fitness levels at all times.

Wearables can measure low blood oxygen levels, a symptom of Covid. It could be a boon for monitoring babies as they can’t fully communicate their medical problems. They can detect motion disorders, incorrect postures and detect heart/asthmatic attacks. Wearables can sync with any other IoT device in the house and trigger alerts to specific individuals in case anything should go wrong. You can even have a manual panic button.

Usually one visits a doctor after a medical emergency and the hospital checks the data after the incident has happened. With wearable IoTs, they will know what exactly happened at that exact time. Insurance companies are pushing these devices and are ready to lower premiums if the person uses them regularly.

7. Vaccine development: Many viruses have been around for thousands of years and some vaccines took hundreds of years to develop. This production time was brought down to decades and in some cases five years. But the Covid-19 vaccine was developed within a year. That has happened thanks to technology. The potential of mRNA vaccine technology is not just speed, but range. Researchers are trying to use this for almost every disease they can think of.

8. Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology was used to manufacture PPE kits during the Covid crisis. The field of nanomedicine is huge and has many applications like targeted drug delivery. A lot of research in this field is going on to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS. Tissue engineering is one thing that could go big in the future. Nanoparticles are used in imaging and sensing. Medical nanodevices are another application.

9. Drones: This is an extension of the robots. Drones have already been used to deliver medicines and organs to far off places. This can be done on a wider scale, especially during emergencies to beat the traffic. Patients in far off places could receive supplies and collaborate with remote doctors via the drone’s video capabilities. They could be used to collect and transport blood samples. Drones are getting bigger and bigger. Firms are working on drone ambulances. The Flying Doctor has been very successful in Australia. Drones could supersize that.

10. The Cloud: All of the above is getting stitched together with the help of the cloud. Hospital records are getting digitized. We are sorting out issues like interoperability. All this huge data can be stored on the cloud and analyzed threadbare with AI tools as mentioned above. Today the cloud can take care of issues like data privacy and security, very important for sensitive medical records. Like the World Wide Web, you could have a World Wide Medical Network.