Transforming the Future of Healthcare… A Paradigm Shift in Medicine
By Dr. Paul Runge
LiveFreely Chief Medical Officer
We are at an inflection point in the delivery of healthcare. A point in time at which a tectonic paradigm shift is occurring. We will be the beneficiaries of personalized bespoke healthcare available wherever and whenever required. The technologies enabling this transition include remote monitoring, telemedicine, rapidly expanding availability of inexpensive computer processing power, and artificial intelligence. In the immediate future that is now, we can consult the world’s leading medical experts who have access to the most accurate medical information to provide us with the best outcome. An added benefit is that healthcare becomes precisely tailored to us, to the individual. Bespoke medical healthcare is now a reality.
Lessons learned from the recent pandemic, which mandated isolation, have brought about significant change in how we now think about and deliver healthcare. We now realize that not
only is it possible to deliver quality healthcare remotely, without face-to-face direct patient-doctor contact, but there are many benefits to all involved parties in doing so.
The time-honored manner of providing face-to-face healthcare is less than ideal and often results in patients delaying seeking access to the system. This allows a medical condition to become well-established, resulting in worse outcomes. This historical model is antiquated and at best inconvenient, inefficient, expensive, wasteful and often inaccurate, thereby delaying early treatment and resulting in poor outcomes.
Remote delivery of healthcare opens access for all of us to the world’s leading medical experts in any given field. The added benefits of this unencumbered access include rapid, accurate and early diagnosis. This will improve outcomes and ultimately reduce costs.
The New Era of Medicine
This new era of medicine includes medical avatars who will provide non-threatening and non-judgmental interactions.
These avatars will improve the doctor-patient interface, have access to the latest up to date medical information and research, which can improve delivery in real-time by using data collection and iteration to improve diagnostic and delivery of recent medical advancements in real-time. Your family doctor instantaneously transitions from being a medical traffic cop, directing you to the appropriate medical expert, to the medical expert we have heretofore only had in our dreams. This allows the system to tailor medical care, healthcare delivery, diagnostics, and data analysis on the fly providing precise personalized medical care fine-tuned to the individual.
Currently, when doctors consider diagnoses and treatments, they are accessing limited medical information and data collected from generic populations; however, patients are not statistics, we are unique individuals, and using statistical information extracted from generic populations to make decisions regarding individual patients is terribly flawed since it employs inaccurate assumptions. Our new model of individualized healthcare delivery focuses on the individual rather than a statistical population and will provide truly personalized medical care focused on the patient.
In addition, removing the judgmental and biased individual from the equation, our current family physician, results in a more comfortable patient doctor interaction with more accurate sharing of symptoms. Essential to the transition in our healthcare system is the utilization of medical avatars. These are completely nonjudgemental physicians/colleagues/friends who speak your language, accent, and regional dialect and interact with you in a completely personalized manner. They do not have the time, place, scheduling, and monetary constraints of their human counterparts. They will listen to you, hear what you are saying, take the time to analyze and clarify your medical concerns in a non-hurried place of your choosing. This provides a comfortable, relaxed and nonthreatening environment where the patient can better recall symptoms and where all questions and concerns are comfortably addressed. This interaction now becomes one of interacting with your best friend who just happens to be the world’s leading expert in all the areas of medicine having access to the entire world’s font of medical knowledge being updated in real-time.
This provides you with the most accurate diagnosis in the least amount of time using the most efficient and least expensive testing algorithms. As a result, you receive the most accurate diagnosis and best treatment, including preventative care leading to the best possible outcome.
Added benefits include efficient use of your time, your doctor’s time, testing time, best and most accurate treatment, shortest duration of treatment with the earliest disease resolution. This will ultimately result in changes in patient behavior to avoid future medical catastrophes.
One of the added benefits of real-time data analytics of your medical concerns is that your healthcare becomes extremely personalized. The information acquired by collecting and analyzing your medical information can also be used to improve the healthcare of an entire population.
One thing we now realize is that population-based medicine does not work. Conditions affecting one group are different in other ethnicities and other populations. Also, signs, symptoms, laboratory results, treatments and results are influenced by genetic background, race, ethnicity, age, sex, and vary with the environment in which individuals live.
Achieving the best possible outcome in medicine requires that all aspects of the individual be accounted for so that medical intervention and therapeutics can be tailored to the individual and not some generic population.
The benefits. You will have a personal physician who is tailored to you and literally becomes your best friend. This best friend doctor has access to the world’s medical knowledge. He will assimilate all your history, genetic family history, regional/environmental history, symptoms, signs, reiterated experiential data/results of various treatments. By doing so, develop a plan for treating the acute situation but also build a plan to prevent future problems that you will develop and can now avoid by changing your behavior. He will also be able to counsel you regarding lifestyle changes to provide you with lifelong health and longevity. He will be in a position to suggest good and bad behaviors, professions, environments, including regions to live. This can range from world geography down to the more granular level of towns and perhaps even neighborhoods.
All of this accumulated data collected in real-time with be evaluated and reiterated in order to personalize your medical healthcare. Suddenly, your healthcare becomes personalized to you…specifically tailored to you, the individual and not being derived from population statistics. This creates true bespoke concierge medical delivery at its best.
Easy access leading to early accurate diagnosis and treatment is the key to providing you with tailored bespoke medical care, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, environment, efficient, where and when you need it. This model provides the most efficient and least expensive deployment of medical resources.
This is the Medical Nirvana we dream of and the healthcare delivery system we not only deserve, but should demand. It not only puts us in charge of our healthcare, but also gives us a vested interest in maintaining and improving our own health. Sigmund Freud stated that the most important aspect of healing was the patient’s commitment to doing so. You must have “skin in the game” to get better.
And the future is now.