Summary
As digital health technologies make patients the point of care, The Medical Futurist and its accompanying Institute are designed to help individual patients and medical professionals prepare for changes in the near future.
Main text
Ten years ago, I launched The Medical Futurist with a simple goal in mind: to show how we can work with advanced technologies in healthcare while still preserving human connections and empathy. The general idea was to share insights, patient stories, publications, and technological announcements that would help patients, medical professionals, and even policy makers understand the context around how healthcare has been changing in the twenty-first century.
Due to the rising number of patients with chronic conditions, the wide spread of the internet and social media, access to technologies, peer support, and smartphones, the cultural transformation called digital health has been shaping the doctor-patient relationship, making it an equal-level partnership.1 I thought that these changes are so profound that a platform or entity that has no commercial interest in the field would be of value for individuals around the world. The Medical Futurist has grown to a team of 12 experts from a wide range of fields and a dedicated community of like-minded people who really want to make healthcare technology savvy.
However, anyone who has ever tried to bring a product or even an idea to healthcare must know that it is not an easy process. You need to provide evidence, proof, and resources to back your notion. Therefore, we launched The Medical Futurist Institute in 2018 to fulfill that mission too.
We started publishing peer-reviewed papers in digital health,2 artificial intelligence,3 or precision medicine.4 We work with governments and healthcare organizations for free, and we try to be useful wherever we can.
But we do not have a building where we work together. We work digitally and online, scattered around the world from Hungary to Mauritius. We are not funded in the traditional way as we are funded privately and have no commercial interest. We cannot work with everyone that reaches out to us as we can only scale to work with some of the major stakeholders including the World Health Organization or the Canadian Medical Association.
Whenever we test a new digital health gadget or service, we rely on the data science community to better understand the ups and downs of the product. Whenever patients reach out to us for help about analyzing their data and medical records, we look for data science projects they could join. Even the whole concept of digital health very much depends on data scientists as both patients and their medical professionals need help in dealing with the tremendous amount of data they face.5
Without accessible data science projects, start-ups, and tools online, patients and their caregivers are left alone with databases to analyze. It seems that the bottleneck of digital health is the number of data scientists who get involved with such projects.6
If anyone with a data science background checks out a new artificial intelligence (AI)-based medical app, a digital health sensor, or algorithm, they will have dozens of ideas about how to improve those. There is no doubt now that digital health is becoming the new norm. The better we can analyze the gargantuan amount of data coming from these technologies, the sooner we can transform healthcare to make patients the point of care.
We need data scientists then to look for patterns, help discover unusual associations between data and health outcomes, and to look at medical futurism and see how they can engage with it and help people through the use of data. We ask them to contribute to the rise of digital health with their expertise and unique perspective on health data.
In a way, at The Medical Futurist, we also believe and work by patterns. If there is a technological announcement in energy or transportation, we look for possible association with healthcare. If there are news about how a technology company wants to provide care, we look for past examples in the field and try to extrapolate into the future. If there is a story about the claims of a medical technology company, especially about the role artificial intelligence can play in medicine, we look for the proof and the context.
I hope that the message The Medical Futurist brings forward is that healthcare should not take place over our shoulders. Instead, we are the key players in it, and our data represent the tools we can use to improve our health and care (Box 1).
Box 1. The vision of The Medical Futurist.
We envision healthcare to be seamless: that the process from diagnosing the symptoms to monitoring the process is error free. We see the first steps in this direction through advanced AI systems in diagnosis or in medical-level at-home devices. Healthcare shall also be invisible, so patients can enjoy the attention of experts and technologies of the entire healthcare universe. With the extraordinary rise of telemedicine solutions, this too we already see happening. We also envision healthcare to be preventive. Becoming proactive gives us the chance to live longer and healthier lives preventing diseases from developing.
Biography
About the author
Bertalan Meskó is The Medical Futurist and the director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is also an Amazon Top 100 author. Additionally, he is a private professor at Semmelweis Medical School, Budapest, Hungary.
Dr. Meskó was featured by dozens of top publications, including CNN, the World Health Organization, National Geographic, Forbes, TIME magazine, BBC, and the New York Times. He publishes his analyses regularly on medicalfuturist.com.
He is a certified superforecaster for Good Judgment, Inc.
References
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