The Future of Healthcare
What it might look like…
Imagine yourself walking into a large enclosed room, with an empty white cushioned bed in the middle. You lie down and a count down begins. 5,4,3,2 and 1 … machines descend from the roof and begin to circulate your body. Lazer blue lines slowly make their way from the tip of your toes to your head. To the best of human knowledge, you are being scanned. Scanned for a minor cold to cancer. What are your chances of developing Parkinson’s disease in the next 5 years? How about osteoporosis? Algorithms quickly run on the data being collected.
Before you entered the room, your DNA had been completely sequenced. The answers you put to the life-style questions, how often do you exercise, how many hours of sleep do you get? Your age, sex, height, weight, race, marital status, number of children, performance on past physical and mental tests, history of conditions. The level of pollution and IMD rank of your area were all made available to the algorithms.
Results from the algorithms are sent directly to your general practitioner who now has the responsibility of affirming them. After around 5 minutes of scans you get up to walk into a separate room to meet your GP. On the doctors screen there is a distribution of possible diagnoses, sadly with lung cancer at the top. Your GP reviews the results of a scan that produces a 3D image of your internals and confirms the diagnosis. You are given a probability of survival of 98% due its early diagnosis and are sent directly to a surgical room to have the tumour removed.
You enter a room filled with multiple mechanical arms each with various tools at the end of them. You are greeted by the surgeon and are placed on a bed. Moments later, a large arm descends to give you general anaesthetic. After safely falling asleep, the surgeon walks into a separate room that has a large screen angled against the bottom of the glass window displaying your heart rate, blood pressure and various other health statistics.
The surgeon carefully places his hand in two futuristic looking gloves which are connected to the mechanical arms. Any small movement is imitated by the machines. He places a set of goggles on which provides a full view of your body. After a series of meticulous movements by the surgeon, the surgery is complete. You awaken to see your surgeon who informs you on the success of the operation. You are moved to a large elevator to be placed on the roof of the hospital for recovery. You find the place to be filled with trees, flowers and bushes and notice a bed located in the centre of a dome with multiple monitoring devices set up. You notice the air to be incredibly fresh.
After spending 1 day in the recovery room you are ready to go home and are given a mobile-like device to monitor your symptoms. This device feeds data live to your GP’s computer system and enables the GP to make appointments with you from home. You are given a sophisticated recovery plan based on your current life-style and genetic make-up which you look to follow over the coming year.
Share your thoughts on the above story. What do you think the future of healthcare would look like?
