How three digital trends will transform personal healthcare by 2025

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When people think of healthcare in the home, they tend to think of aging populations, therapeutic treatments and stand-alone devices such as blood pressure monitors. But there is a much bigger data-led disruption taking place in personal healthcare. And it’s starting in the home. Three factors are driving this change.

Affordable wearable devices— think smart watches — are constantly monitoring metrics such as heart rate, blood pressure and ECG functions in addition to our fitness activity. This passive, continuous, data capture model is strikingly different from existing models, where data is captured only as a snapshot, and only when a symptomatic person has seen a healthcare practitioner. By 2025, a growing proportion of citizens will be continuously capturing terabytes of their own personal health-related data, all day, every day. And not just wearables: our homes will also contain sensors capturing data: room temperature, humidity, air quality, the presence of pathogens, noise and other environmental markers, that affect our wellbeing.

A second factor is the impact of the ever-more powerful, ever-more affordable cloud. Today most personal health data is discarded, and only aggregated information is retained. By 2025, the cost of processing and storing personal health data in the cloud will have decreased to the point where individuals will be able to afford to retain all the data their body and home generates 24 hours a day. Cloud technologists like to say that data has gravity: it attracts. Applications and processing power move to where the data resides.  And when applications run where data is stored, they can analyse it in a timely and economical manner.

And that leads to the third factor: the continuing evolution of AI and machine-learning generating insights into the data captured by those sensors. Computer vision, in combination with virtual assistants, will be able to identify when we are unwell, to recognise when we fall and hurt ourselves or suffer heart attacks. They will log when we take – or forget – our medication and identify and record what we eat. Analysis of this data will generate insights, previously unimaginable, into the health of individuals and across population groups. And, thanks to cloud computing, AI is becoming more affordable. Individuals will be able to have their own continuous AI analysis of their health data 24/7, alerting them when professional medical advice is needed.

Taken together these factors mean that we will soon view personal health data in the same way as we now look at personal credit scores and financial records. But with two critical differences. First, patient records of Government or insurance providers will be the smallest part of our personal health data. And second, while public and private healthcare providers will benefit from accessing individual health data when we’re unwell, they won’t own our data. They will only get access to it when we provide it.

This has implications for public healthcare organisations. They cannot download and analyse the vast repositories of our personal data, even if we gave them permission. That would be too inefficient and expensive. Instead they will need to run their AI applications in the cloud, where the data is stored, generating insights far faster and far more affordably than we can today.

As our definition of personal health data expands beyond traditional government and private organization sources to include consumer generated data, it will incorporate not just biological metrics, but also what we did and,  since Covid, where we went and who we were with. This rich, continuously growing data set represents a huge opportunity to gain more meaningful health insights, but only if we build systems in the cloud to make use of the exabytes of data that will reside there.

To hear more about the benefits and challenges of cloud transformation in healthcare, join the eHealthNews Live free webinar on August 5 at 12.30pm. Find out more and register here.

Source: Johnathon Meichtry, Principal Cloud Consultant, Unisys NZ media release, 20 July 2020

Sector updates are provided by organisations to eHealthNews.nz and have not necessarily been edited or checked for accuracy. Any queries should be directed to the organisation issuing the release.

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