Health Expert: How We’re Mending Our Healthcare System With Data
The landscape of leveraging technology to measure and improve lives in global healthcare is no doubt eclipsing expectations every day.
It’s changing our behavior and expectations of current day medicine from bench-to-bedside: such as speed to market and access.
Data has become such a ‘hot button’ word, but it becomes meaningful when asking the real question: how are we, as the global community of healthcare, innovating data for healthcare? (As opposed to: how are we innovating healthcare?). This is what is interesting and relevant to our digital space.
Data forms the framework of Health Information Systems (HiT) that researchers and physicians are using to formulate treatment strategies in clinical trials and for diagnoses in the hospital. The insights derived impact process efficiencies in the laboratories and reduce costs at the payer level. But ultimately, it is about the customer and improving their experience via smarter product design.
Data and digital are not inherent siblings, which is why the explosion of data in digital is key. For example, website data are increasingly core to healthcare businesses. The data are available in real time, challenging the healthcare businesses to unleash and implement relevant activities, engaging in compliant marketing automation, personalization, etc.
We then go back and create new digital experiences to enable and increase the acquisition of more relevant data. A true cycle.
Here are a few pillars we lean on:
Mobile – mHealth
mHealth pioneered the idea of being customer–centric. We are seeing the space expand from mobile tablets and apps in sales teams to virtual office visits. It transcends to the value-based as well as efficiencies in care, timeliness and engagement. Patients (and HCPs) are also taking healthcare into their own hands with preventive and self-monitoring wearable health/medical devices, like Dexcom, a market leader in Continuous Glucose Monitoring.
Dexcom offers the patient and the HCP, not only the wearable opportunity for Type 1 Diabetes candidates, to track their glucose levels, but also integrates to compatible smart devices with its proprietary software to follow and share data with family, caregivers and HCPs.
Personalization
Breast cancer diagnosis is no longer a certain death sentence. Modern treatment regimens are based on molecular diagnoses. The therapies contain many components like ingredients in a recipe based on data and technology that inform a nuanced, personalized treatment plan.
Patient personalization has become the new expectation, and that is based on hard data and thorough analysis as well as access. This is what is revolutionizing healthcare—like with breast cancer therapy—slowly changing it from a deadly disease to a chronic illness.
AI
Using AI context at scale, decoupling content from the experience, promises to facilitate and expedite onboarding in the doctor’s office environment, and allows us to deliver on a specific, well-defined application, deep focus and specific health challenges.
At the American Diabetes Association (ADA) Congress meeting in June, IBM Watson Health and the ADA announced a partnership to help create a new series of digital tools that will ultimately redefine how diabetes is prevented, identified and managed. Their first phase was to challenge developers at large to focus on cognitive apps that leverage the Association’s robust data resources and Watson insights. The purpose of the challenge is to advance the use of technology to promote health and to ultimately help improve the lives of those living with diabetes or prediabetes.
Access
Open-source platform development such as Drupal got its start in 2001 and today this data has taken shape to a formidable CMS (content management systems) solution for millions of organization’s digital destination.
Now this same idea has revolutionized the way chemists in academia created and moreover did the unthinkable: freely shared the development of data in a key molecule with pharmaceutical companies in the hopes accelerating drug discovery in targeted cancer therapies. Because of this strategy, not the science necessarily, open source and crowdsourcing in science has been recognized at the bedside in Multiple Myelomas, Leukemia, and Lymphoma.
Every decade can be looked at as the one that has changed the course of medicine forever. And, while each and every advancement does have an impact, the Data Decade that we’re in the midst of will reverberate like no other. This fundamentally redefined our approach to healthcare: the way we look at treating disease, how physicians and patients interact, our expectations for progress.
We suspect the fast-moving private sector and government agencies like the National Institute of Health will align tighter in their efforts as we realize optimizations to public service design models, leveraging factions such as Kickstarter in serving healthcare needs globally.
Lisa Kaufmann is Global Head of Mirum Health, and specializes in delivering strategic solutions and engaging Partners to identify and deliver digital road map for their brand in Mirum’s Health division. A 17-year digital marketing and advertising professional, Kaufmann’s experience in both domestic and international markets has attributed to her success in integrated marketing for global healthcare and hospital organizations such as the Pfizer and premier Ospedale Riuniti near Milano, Italy.
Mirum is a global agency focused on Marketing and Digital Services. Mirum works with organizations that view digital as the mechanism to drive change, and uses technology and creativity to help them pivot into new directions and find new revenue opportunities.
