Smart toilets assessing your health while you pee, virtual GP appointments from the comfort of your own home, cancer-detecting smartphone cameras: the future of health is now. There’s a lot to be optimistic about and, when the NHS is under huge strain, new innovative products and services are wholly welcome.
The way we understand and experience health is changing rapidly. Health and wellness has become connected, holistic and personalised, transforming what, how and who businesses deliver products and services with and for.
From our research and work with leading healthcare providers and wellness brands, we’ve observed four opportunity areas: better diagnostics, improved personalisation, holistic health and collaboration.
Data is king and it’s making a difference to diagnosis. With the vast amount of data available about individual and patient population health, AI algorithms are transforming datasets into insights that can speed up diagnosis.
Take Ada, one of the most downloaded and trusted medical apps. Magnetic worked with Ada to turn a successful AI app for doctors into a trusted self-diagnosis tool for everyone. Now it’s used in more than 130 countries to speed up diagnosis of immunologic and rare diseases.
How we get diagnosed is changing and an example is self-testing kits. Since the global pandemic, the self-testing kit market has erupted and continues to grow in 2023, due to high consumer demand for habitual testing. The emergence of d2c products for at-home tests include: Thriva, general health insights from at-home blood tests; Womco, personalised nutrition for hormonal health; Awesome Health’s Ava, the first fertility-tracking device; and Zoe, helping people understand how different foods affect their body.
These innovations are democratising diagnosis, simultaneously improving treatment by making it personalised. Whether it’s what you eat or how you exercise, future health is tailored to the individual and no longer a one-size-fits-all approach.
With more understanding of our bodies and behaviours, our view of health is changing. We now understand health to include physical health, mental health, emotional health, gut health, brain health, financial health and sexual health.
With this broader understanding of what being healthy means, we see new growth areas. For example, Boots has partnered with Lemonaid Health to expand into primary care service offerings across a range of health areas, from menopause to migraines to sexual health, and in parallel it also launched new product lines that complement these new need areas.
Another example is Bupa. Recognising that mental health and wellbeing is the number one workplace concern, the private healthcare insurance provider launched a game-changing mental health proposition for businesses. We worked with Bupa on this, helping to change how people feel by supporting businesses with forward-thinking, industry leading care. Find out more in the press release.
If future healthcare is holistic healthcare, this presents a need for more players to partner within the ecosystem. It means rethinking where, how and to whom healthcare is being delivered. Collaboration is at the heart of this.
There’s already change at the highest levels, such as the announcement of the European Health Data Space (EHDS), which focuses on health data exchange between patients and health professionals across EU member states. It will give European citizens access to the same healthcare as they would have in their home countries, when travelling or living abroad. It will also be used to improve research, resulting in improved diagnosis and treatments across Europe and enabling healthcare providers to access new markets.
Future healthcare will be digital, personalised, interconnected and most importantly collaborative. It will help not just individuals but whole societies to become healthier and happier.
Risk, responsibility and doing the right thing
Despite all of the benefits and advantages innovation brings, there are also new challenges and risks that emerge. When it’s about people’s health, there’s a lot at stake. If a technology makes a mistake, it could put someone’s life in danger, raising questions about liability and trust. It goes even beyond just an individual’s life. If not managed properly, technology can reinforce discriminatory biases and increase societal disparity.
For example, researchers at University College London had developed algorithms to diagnose liver disease but found that the algorithms had missed 44% of the cases among women, compared with 23% among men. The researchers noted that the disparity in the performance reflected inequalities in care, as the indicators used by the algorithm appear to be more effective indicators of disease in men.
This shows how AI mirrors our own biases, as humans determine what datasets, variables and rules the algorithms learn from to make predictions. It’s just one example of how biases in AI can be a huge risk, accelerating societal disparity on top of the privacy and security concerns that surround AI.
It also shows us how AI can be a force for good, accelerating diagnosis and predicting disease within large patient populations. This could help prevent or treat conditions sooner, prolong lives and save healthcare systems significant costs.
This rapid advancement in diagnosis raises another important ethical question: when is information helpful and when does it become harmful?
Google Lens has announced a new feature where people can use their smartphone’s camera to scan their skin for conditions, with immediate diagnosis results. Although we can get excited about how this democratises access to diagnosis, questions need to be answered about how much information is useful for the patient to know and when it should be at the discretion of a professional.
In addition, how does this change the role of the medical professional and when is too much reliability on technology a risk?
Like anything new, we have to maximise the benefits while monitoring any unintended harmful consequences to people and society. How can we find a balance between the need for innovation and the ethical considerations, to design a future where we can all thrive? As industry leaders, it’s critical that we ask the tough questions and seek to design future health and wellness (system, care and providers) with integrity, transparency and inclusion at the heart.
Written by Magnetic.
