Transforming healthcare with precision and specificity
I cannot wait for the moment in time when maintaining our health will not be a mystery or a privilege of the lucky ones having doctor’s care at hand, enough knowledge on the topic, or belong to a well-researched group of people.
I am waiting for a beautiful moment in time when our conditions and symptoms contributing to them would be segmented enough to altogether prevent missed or too late diagnosis. And although we are already heading in the direction of finding and understanding smaller and smaller subpopulations of individuals experiencing specific subsets of symptoms, complex diseases can be sneaky bastards, harboring many diverse symptoms. Now we have tools and ways to be smarter.
Symptoms of single YOU
What does single you represent? It is a point when you start deviating from the common denominator of a given disease. It can be seen in a way your complex disease is displayed when compared to your most similar group of people.
It is expected that single you will have some very specific, individual symptoms that will change in a location (on or inside your body) and time, as well as how intensely you feel it. Somewhere interwoven with your very individual experiences will be shared symptom experiences: with family, age-mates, people sharing the same geography, lifestyle or specific genetic mutations.
It is unfortunate to predict the number of individual symptoms, but I can say that the “symptom set” will differ to a larger or smaller extent (I am aware it is not specific enough at this point). The number and timeline also depend on how prompt are you to note and react to the symptoms.
Knowledge on the specific, or what we believe is a specific symptom will allow us to broaden our symptom database, and expand the charts of human experiences. That will not only help to have more integrated knowledge on a specific disease symptom, which is super valuable per se. It will also allow us to understand when and how is the health status of a person is likely to undergo change.
This will undoubtedly transform healthcare as we know it today.
Smartphones as databases of our health
Our smart phones are the databases of our health. We do log our life meticulously (sorry for the ones that don’t, I think you might be becoming a minority very soon, if not already).
We have all taken photos of us (selfies, I know): what we eat, where we go and what do we do at least to some extent. We check in the bars and restaurants, gyms and travel destinations. We measure how much and often we swim, walk or run, how long did we sleep and approximately half of us tracks how long is our menstrual cycle.
We like posts or people on social networks at any given time, evaluate how happy, stressed or content are we today, and compare it to the past.
We measure and sometimes go back to the old data. And then we compare and try to make some conclusion and sense out of it. It is in human nature — checking if what is happening to us is “normal”.
Now, only if we would have not only the analytics, but also the predictions: How good will I be next week, when the weather is sunny and my workload is going down? Am I likely to get a toothache? Bad digestion? Because my mobile phone knows I like eating pizza on Wednesday, and I get diarrhea on Thursday. Am I on the path to injure my bones or ligaments? This is not science fiction. This is reality.
We have an increasing culture of sharing: share apartments, holiday houses, cars, clothes, information and more. We share with our friends, but also with people that have similar interests to us. As a reward we get recommendations of places and things that we might appreciate on the basis of our behavioral pattern. That is how Soundcloud and Spotify recommendations on music that we might like to listen, or Amazon with books that we appreciate reading, or Lifesum with building healthy habits.
There are tons of data produced by our smartphones, and in my opinion, we did not start using even a 10% of it to make us healthier, better and happier human beings. I do understand that with health it does become more complex, because stakes are higher. Bad cocktail tip vs bad medical advice somehow has a clear “winner”.
Us, humans are a bit of paradoxical creatures: so protective and distrustful when it comes to our health information, at the same time so hard to be made to go to the doctors. Excuses are sometimes valid, but largely not. However, with the amount of the new apps pushed out to help, there should be less excuses and more action.
Now we can book appointments through the app, find a good doctor through apps that offer recommendations, or apps help you and your doctor manage a condition that one develops (Genia for CF is so beautiful, although it seems only available in Swedish). In this share world of ours one thing is missing: more apps (because there will and should not be only one) to help you maintain and improve your health.
Sharing health data is the new sexy
All of collected data has tremendous power. Power to understand how are we doing compared to yesterday, power to predict how will we be doing tomorrow and power to know our good zone, and to maintain it.
We have a possibility to see how do people close to us in age and lifestyle do, how close are we to reaching our set goals.
We can see how does healthy proportion of people feel like, and what are they doing to maintain their health. We can see how did the group of people diagnosed with a condition feel when they were at the start of their sickness.
Those knowledges are the very crucial components of our health. Data you collected on your smart phone can be data on your healthcare providers screen. Distilled and transformed into understandable prediction charts.
Things I am writing about are not all in the future, there are apps that allow you to either export portion of your data to present it to the outer world, or they allow you sharing between the multiple mobile platforms. Doctors that I have met have shown incredible interest in this, it makes everyones life easier and better.
This ability to share more than just a 5-minute snapshot of you with your doctor will do wonders to your doctor-patient relationship. Your healthcare provider will get to know you better, and understand your concerns in a different, deeper way: mostly because you will be able to voice them and substantiate them through the evidence collected on your phone. This has multiple implications on the healthcare:
Time from when you notice symptoms for the first time to time when you will be diagnosed will be cut shorter: mostly because doctors will assess you faster, and have more time to ask you detailed question, and this should lead to faster referral to the specialist.
Doctors will become aware of new, emerging symptoms. They will get live updates on averages, trends in health and disease feeding directly into prediction charts
Healthcare providers will also become more aware of each of our uniqueness, and will be able to understand regional and individual differences better.
All of that will of course help with design of more efficient treatments.
The strength of our data is in it’s diversity: but the power of it is in sharing it. Share your data and reclaim your own health!
In conclusion to my series of big data and early disease detection: Big Data will be powerful when we have a way to analyse and share it amongst all of us. Sharing your big data is beautiful; you allow a better chance to your health, while also enabling a better chance to health to other human beings.
You can watch short version of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEUx4QgU9VY
