Today the Economist publishes a special issue on health care and technology “Medicine goes Digital”. The content has also been published on their website, and following are links to and excerpt from all articles.But you can also download the print version.
Medicine goes digital
The convergence of biology and engineering is turning health care into an information industry. That will be disruptive, says Vijay Vaitheeswaran (interviewed here), but also hugely beneficial to patients.
INNOVATION and medicine go together. The ancient Egyptians are thought to have performed surgery back in 2750BC, and the Romans developed medical tools such as forceps and surgical needles. In modern times medicine has been transformed by waves of discovery that have brought marvels like antibiotics, vaccines and heart stents.
Given its history of innovation, the health-care sector has been surprisingly reluctant to embrace information technology (IT). Whereas every other big industry has computerised with gusto since the 1980s, doctors in most parts of the world still work mainly with pen and paper. [...]
HIT or miss
DREW GREENBLATT is baffled by the technical backwardness of America’s costly health system. He owns Marlin Steel Wire Products, a small firm based in Baltimore that makes components for Toyota, Roche and other multinationals. He offers good health coverage for his employees, but his health costs have nearly doubled since 2000. Last September he went to Congress to plead for legislation that would modernise the information technology used by America’s medical system. “My receptionist, my shipping clerk and even the industrial robots on my factory floor use e-mail,” he says, “so why can’t I e-mail my doctor?” [...]
Flying blind
ANDY GROVE thinks health-care experts should study the chip business. The former boss of Intel, a pioneering microprocessor firm, has spent a lot of time in hospitals of late because he has been battling with prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease. His experience with uneven care, medical errors and slow innovation has convinced him that the health industry needs to do much better.
Dr Grove acknowledges that health care is much more complex than chip manufacturing, but argues that the learning process in medicine is needlessly slow. In his business, firms always reserve a small portion of each newly designed chip for testing. This reduces the part available for commercial use, but it allows firms to learn quickly from failures. By contrast, health care often lacks real-time information systems and data feedback loops are sluggish. Learning comes in batches, like slow and infrequent trains, not like continuous Federal Express deliveries. [...]
Getting personal
“TWENTY years ago doctors had tight control over all medical information. We want that power to shift to individuals,” says Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder of 23andMe, a Californian genomics firm that counts Google as one of its investors. Her firm takes in saliva samples by mail, analyses a tiny bit of the genetic material they contain and posts information about the provider’s health and ancestry gleaned from them on a secure website.
She wants to extend the idea of patient empowerment to the age of genomics (the study of all genes in the genome and the interactions among them). Her customers are already forming online chat groups and blogs to share details of specific genetic mutations and exchange family and genomic histories. [...]
A doctor in your pocket
CAN new technologies help to tackle the health problems of the world’s poorest? At first sight, it seems a silly question. After all, the public-health systems in much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America are rudimentary at best. With many villages having no clean water or basic sanitation, let alone reliable access to clinics and doctors, modern wizardry like molecular diagnostics and digital medical records seem irrelevant.
Bill Gates used to be on the side of the sceptics. Nearly a decade ago, when he was boss of Microsoft, he delivered a speech at a conference on technology for the developing world, inveighing against the idea that modern technologies like satellite communications links, solar power and internet-enabled computers could magically improve the lives of the poorest. Did they have any idea, he asked his listeners, what it means to live on less than $1 a day? “You’re just buying food, you’re trying to stay alive.” [...]
Fantastic Voyage
HALF a century ago, in a film called “Fantastic Voyage”, a tiny Raquel Welch and her team were sent into a dying patient’s body in a nano-submarine to save his life. Technology has still not advanced quite that far, but today’s sophisticated devices and diagnostics are getting ever closer.
At the university hospital in the German city of Aachen, near the border with Belgium and the Netherlands, complex heart surgery that would once have required a lengthy and costly hospital stay has been turned into a routine procedure. Harald Kühl, a professor of cardiology at the hospital, says that patients who have been given heart-valve replacements in the morning are now usually back on their feet the same evening and discharged the next day. [...]
Health 2.0
THE advances in digital medicine described in this special report have already started to move patients from the margins of the medical system to its centre. Some think there are bigger things to come. “The key is patient-driven research,” explains Gregory Simon, head of Faster Cures, an advocacy group in Washington, DC. Most of the push for adopting electronic health records has come from institutions anxious to cut costs and reduce medical errors, but he thinks the biggest gains will come in the shape of better treatments for difficult diseases. He sees patients increasingly getting together online and sharing medical data and treatment histories. [...]
The Economist, 18 April 2009
