On this World Health Day, let’s take a moment to appreciate the healthcare professionals, who travel that extra mile for our healthier future! The healthcare sector is perhaps the most vital sector which directly influences the existence of humanity. Over the centuries-long progress, our healthcare sector has achieved tremendous results increasing the global average life expectancy and living standards. However, the population outburst and modern-day healthcare threats are posing newer challenges for us, and the industry.
The biggest example is the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the growth and advancements in the healthcare sector, the year 2020 has proven that we are nowhere near ‘prepared’ to face an outbreak, epidemic, or pandemic. The studies conducted by the Global Health Security Index found some interesting facts. According to the study, The average overall GHS Index score is 40.2 out of a possible 100. While developed countries have an average score close to 52/100, the Index points out that global preparedness for epidemics and pandemics remains very weak. Moreover, a minimum of 75% of countries receives low scores on globally catastrophic biological risk-related indicators. So the thought of the day is,
Even with the advancements in the medical sector, its current state is not adequate to drive a healthier future. But, it doesn’t mean we are out of hope. The convergence of deep tech in the medical sector is opening up a wide array of opportunities for the medical, health sector to grow faster. In this article, let me give you a quick spin around the tech which has the potential to take your medical sector to the next level.
The healthcare sector is very vast, consisting of several sub-sectors like drug discovery, diagnosis, health management, and a lot more. Over the past few years, several innovative approaches and inventions surfaced in the industry using deep tech such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, RPA, Hyper Automation, IoMT, etc.
Drug discovery is perhaps the most time-consuming process in the health sector. It takes at least ten years on average for a new drug to reach the market. Clinical trials and the drug discovery process itself can take about an average of seven years. This is not at all feasible, given the global trends, the discovery of newer diseases.
We are extremely lucky that coronavirus is comparatively less deadly. If it’s not the case, this could have resulted in the extinction of the human race. So the need of the hour is an efficient, way lot faster mechanism to discover new drugs.
Thanks to innovations in Artificial Intelligence, we can see the light of hope for an efficient drug discovery system. For example, Insilico Medicine used Artificial Intelligence for drug discovery for de novo design of small molecules (GENTRL). They were able to identify the lead compound against fibrosis in just 46 days, which is, in traditional methods, could have taken more than a decade.
One of the top pharmaceutical companies, AstraZeneca has 5 approved drugs as of 2013. And to develop these drugs the company spent an average of $11,790.93 Million dollars for R&D spending per drug. From 1997-2011, the company spent a total of $58,955 Million on R&D. The prolonged trial and error methods and false positives cost a lot to the companies and their ability to launch new drugs to the market.
Using Artificial Intelligence to discover drugs way faster and counter the newly discovered diseases is a massive opportunity for the healthcare industry. There are many stages and procedures in the drug development process which consume a lot of time and mundane resources. Such as the target selection, characterization, compound screening, etc. But implementing AI in this sector could boost up the efficiency of the drug discovery process. As per a survey, AI has the ability to save the drug development process over US$70 billion by 2028.
Read more: Possibilities of AI in drug discovery
Two factors that play an important and essential role in medical diagnosis are early detection of diseases and accurate diagnosis. Millions of people are living in this world without knowing they are infected with a disease. The sheer volume of healthcare infrastructure is not sufficient to diagnose the huge population with traditional methods.
Again, the advancements in Artificial Intelligence technology can do wonders for the medical sector today. However, as the sector is very sensitive, we can’t expect AI-powered diagnostics to go mainstream in the near future. However, AI-assisted diagnosis is a promising field in medical diagnosis.
As per the survey from Accenture and Deloitte, Key clinical health AI applications can potentially create $150 billion in annual savings for the US healthcare economy by 2026 and Medical automation is estimated to generate $410 billion in annual value by 2025 by Improving process efficiency, cost management, health analytics, etc
Read More on : Diabetes Detection with AI
For example, today, AI algorithms can detect cancer with far more accuracy than human counterparts. In an AI-assisted diagnosis model, an AI algorithm would be able to run diagnosis for a large group of people, and only those with a test result score below a defined value need to be diagnosed by a professional medical practitioner. Another option is, an AI system can verify the diagnosis results produced by doctors so that the mistakes and human errors in diagnosis can be identified and alert doctors to reverify the results. A study shows that when patients see a doctor for a new problem, the average diagnostic error rate may be as high as 15 percent.
Read More : Breast Cancer Detection using AI
The advancements in wearable technology also offer many benefits for clinical diagnostics. It is only a matter of time when more sophisticated wearable devices hit the market for low costs and AI systems would have more data to train and the prediction of diseases would be more linear and prompt. Using them, healthcare providers can remotely offer advanced diagnostic services to anyone across the globe.
Read more : Liver disorder detection using machine learning
Contact tracing is a word that we all got familiar with last year. In the instance of an epidemic or outbreak that is spread from human to human, healthcare departments are in a hurry to identify the people who came in close contact with a patient so that they can be quarantined to prevent the further spreading of the disease. The manual process is highly inefficient, time-consuming, prone to errors and missing data points.
Automated contact tracing technologies make use of big data analytics to analyze a mix of cellular location data, GPS data, Bluetooth interactions data for the early detection of primary as well as secondary contacts of an infected person. This piece of technology is very much essential for humanity to be prepared to face a pandemic in the future. And of course, experts say that the next pandemic will happen sooner, not later.
On this note, we (Accubits Technologies) have developed a platform, named as RebuildTheChain – an end-to-end pandemic management system that offers a privacy-preserving exposure analysis and automated contact tracing mechanism. It enables governments to perform automated exposure analysis without compromising the citizens’ data privacy.
Read More : Automated Contact Tracing
Like I said before, healthcare is a sensitive field. A patient’s medical records should be confidential. However, despite having a lot of regulations and compliances in place for the medical sector, a lot of discrepancies and frauds occur in it. According to Forbes, pharmaceutical companies worldwide suffer an estimated loss of about $200 billion dollars every year due to counterfeit drugs.
Moreover, the widespread involvement of third parties in the healthcare industry is now fraught with corruption. The cost of medication and medicines has skyrocketed as a result of this. We can use the aid of technology to help us out. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and tamperproof nature, offers a great solution for the medical sector to establish a more trustable medical infrastructure that can eliminate medical frauds, medical insurance frauds, data misuse, drug supply chain frauds, etc.
Using blockchain technology in the health sector, a patient can have full control over their medical records and medical data. A patient can ask a medical institution to digitally sign a smart contract that prevents any unauthorized alteration or duplication of their data. All of the medical information will be encrypted and stored on a peer-to-peer network and it will be watermarked with a unique code so as to pinpoint who has caused the leak and where it happened.
The next biggest challenge is the accessibility of the healthcare service. We experienced this challenge last year and even today in most parts of the world. During economic lockdowns, reaching a healthcare facility would be hard. Also, in underdeveloped countries, where the healthcare sector is not much developed, people seldom get access to professional or proper medical services.
The advancements in telehealth services, hopefully, can solve this problem to a large extent. The global market for telemedicine software solutions has risen significantly since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Telemedicine, for those unfamiliar with the word, is an app-based technology that assists patients from a distance without physical contact. It has helped to save thousands of people in the midst of this pandemic. The convenience and time efficiency associated with these apps has created a great impact on the lives of many people.
Read more on how you can build an effective telehealth service software: Best Practices in Telemedicine app development and Telehealth services
If you would like to gain better insight into the deep technologies that can efficiently transform the healthcare sector, drop us a message and our experts can help you out. Contact us.
