“Predicting the future of healthcare begins with reading and watching sci-fi,” said Bertalan Meskó, director of the Medical Futurist Institute. Speaking at a Connect in Pharma webinar, Meskó shared the top trends affecting the future of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. He also named barriers to innovation and practical steps that executives can take to drive progress.
“Watching science fiction makes you ask the ‘what if’ questions you don’t normally think about. What if a new technology could change your life? What if certain decisions would lead to an ethical nightmare? What if an algorithm could provide the same level of empathy as a human? The more you play with these questions, the more prepared you will be for the future,” Mesko said.
Ultimately, the pace of innovation in healthcare is too slow, he said. Meskó went on to ask his key ‘what if’ question: “What if we could have the sci-fi-like experience seen in other sectors in medicine and healthcare – the most important industry of all.” We have algorithms that can beat the greatest chess masters, headsets that allow us to play games on different levels of reality and smartwatches with more computing power than the Apollo spaceships. “Sci-fi is becoming a reality in every sector, but healthcare lags behind.”
Three key barriers holding healthcare back
“The first barrier is that healthcare is not open to tech innovation,” Meskó said. With a five million worker deficit in healthcare worldwide, predicted to increase to ten million by 2030, the sector is stretched, leading to a lack of trust towards healthcare systems that struggle to meet patient demand. “There’s a lack of money across the whole sector, meaning there’s no money available for innovation,” he said, describing the dual issue of public healthcare systems with no innovation funding verses private healthcare systems with innovation funding only available to the wealthy, leading to health inequality. “Healthcare has never been designed to be open to tech innovation.”
“The next barrier is the people working in the system – we are the bottleneck of adoption – we don’t like change,” he continued. For example, it took physicians 30 years to begin to adopt the stethoscope after it was first suggested 200 years ago; many said they didn’t want to use ‘gadgets’ while practising the ‘art’ of medicine.
“And the final barrier is the fear of the unknown, which in this case is automation in the form of AI.” Meskó returned to the analogy of chess: “Every chess player and coach must use AI to stay competitive. AI has made chess more competitive, better and more popular – the same fate awaits healthcare.”
Every single medical professional will have to use AI to design better treatment plans and patients will have to use AI to get meaningful information from the huge amount of data they can measure about their health, he said. “Even policymakers will have to use AI to make better decisions for their countries and governments.”
Meskó went on to ask members of the pharmaceutical and biotech sector to make three important considerations when moving forward.
Make patients the leaders of their healthcare journey
“Patients are becoming the newest members of their medical team,” he said. “The first and most important action is that all healthcare and pharmaceutical companies must embrace patient design.”
Unlike the concept of ‘patient-centricity’, patient design is a more active process that involves patients in highest level of decision-making. “Every organisation, every company, every health government, every medical association needs a patient advisory board,” he added.
Embrace technology to augment what you do
“The second action for the pharmaceutical sector is to use good technologies to augment what you do,” said Meskó.
He outlined the major trends shaping healthcare today, all which are made possible by effective use of new technologies and digital tools. In addition to increased equality between stakeholders and patients, the major trends include greater globalisation of healthcare, the development of treatment packages that combine medication with digital health tools, increased digital therapeutics and a rise in home diagnostics.
“Digital technologies make healthcare more globalised. An Australian patient can send a cancerous tissue sample to a start-up in Belgium where the DNA could be sequenced for driver mutations using a US-based cloud service, then find a clinical trial run by a Japanese pharma company on a Spanish island, and the patient could get precision treatment for their type of cancer,” he elaborated.
“There are plenty of examples of good technologies that are already bringing real benefits.” Meskó highlighted some stand-out use-cases, including augmented reality to train new recruits faster, innovative medical packaging with QR codes, an improved supply chain to make personalised medicine a reality, digital biomarkers that allow patients to measure real-time health data and deep learning applications for drug design.
“Tech giants are starting to dive into healthcare. They don’t have the medical expertise that the pharmaceutical sector has, but they’re very good at providing tech products that people want to use, so we need to collaborate,” he said.
“A great tool is the ‘digital health bingo card’” said Meskó, sharing his checklist of six questions to ask when considering a new ‘breakthrough’:
1. Does it meet a real-life patient or clinical need?
2. Is it scientifically backed?
3. Does it share data with patients?
4. Does it improve the doctor-patient relationship?
5. Does it use tech that patients already own?
6. Does it help to make healthcare globalised?
The questions on his checklist represent the major features of the cultural transformation and he advised that at least two must be true for an innovative technology to be on the right track.
A vision of the doctor-patient consultation of the future
“You might think that people like me would want to put technologies into patient consultations, but my vision is entirely the opposite.” Meskó described his future vision of a face-to-face meeting between a doctor and patient with every visible technology and interface removed, leaving simply two people having a real-life conversation with trust, empathy and compassion. “But,” he interrupted, “they should be surrounded by seamless, invisible, really advanced technologies – chatbots in the cloud, artificial intelligence decision support, wearable heart sensors, portable diagnostic devices – it doesn’t matter which technologies, but they will improve the doctor-patient relationship.”
Understanding the patient of the near future
How do we reach this vision? Meskó’s third practical step for the healthcare and pharmaceutical profession is to understand the patients of the near future – ‘patients like me’. He outlined profiles of patients who are very engaged in their healthcare before getting a diagnosis because they’re invested in the chance of a long, healthy life.
“[These are] people who are tracking their fitness, people who are monitoring their sleep, people who measure their stress levels – people who are using commercially available apps and devices to constantly collect data about their health in order to motivate themselves to live better.”
Meskó spoke of modern patients who are willing to voluntarily have their genomes sequenced to better understand their disease risks and medication needs, or to have their microbiome sequenced to better understand how to optimise their diet. “You must know me as well as possible. Step into the shoes of the patient of tomorrow so you can create products, medications and services for them,” he said.
Creating an ecosystem for innovation
“Every major medical technology we use today started as a far-fetched idea,” said Meskó, adding that the culture around healthcare needs to allow these far-fetched ideas to become part of day-to-day medical practice. “As part of the pharmaceutical and R&D industry, you play an important role – you create the ecosystem, the technologies, the supply chains, to make these ideas real possibilities for patients.” He envisioned a world where every repetitive and data-oriented task is automated, allowing the workers of the future to focus on tasks that require creativity, intuition and the skills that are uniquely human.
“We are in a cultural transformation and the hierarchy of the traditional healthcare model is shifting. The doctor and patient are becoming equals, and we’re moving to a world where the patient is the point of care – wherever they are, they will receive the diagnosis and treatment they need,” he added.
Meskó ended his talk by alluding to the next step in this transformation: “The next paradigm shift is imminent – and this will involve an AI entity joining the patient and doctor as part of their healthcare team.”
Through embracing science fiction and not shying away from the ‘what if’ questions, the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector will be best prepared to adopt future paradigm shifts in the way we view human health, concluded Meskó.
About Connect in Pharma: After a successful launch in 2022, Connect in Pharma returns to Geneva from 14-15 June.