Shelley Zieroth, director, St. Boniface Hospital Heart Failure and Transplant Clinics; Beth Healey, doctor, Hospital Universitaire Geneve; and Scott Drawer, director of sport, Millfield School joined WIRED’s contributing editor João Medeiros in a panel to disrupt current thinking on the future of holistic patient care within the interconnected cardio-renal-metabolic space.
Interdisciplinarity is a difficult challenge to crack. Indeed, very few disciplines truly practice it. But those that do, find success in such an approach.
When treating patients, physicians tend to focus solely on their specific discipline—despite research showing how diseases of the cardio-renal-metabolic system are connected. “It’s easier for us to think about one issue, one problem, when they’re actually connected”, says Shelley Zieroth. However, “we’ve made such incredible advances in the last decade of what we can do to improve clinical outcomes and the functional status of our patients. Although, for a lot of clinicians, the evolution and change of heart failure therapies is thought to be very complex”.
In order to overcome these challenges, communication is key, as “it’s about creating dialogue and getting everyone talking to each other as often people are trying to solve the same problem” explains Beth Healey, doctor at Hospital Universitaire Geneve, particularly as we move to a more remote world post-Covid. “We've streamlined a lot,” Zieroth explains. “We’ve minimized a lot of work in terms of recognizing and trying to advocate for improvements in heart failure and care.”
Sports science is one sector that has successfully risen to the challenge. “In high performance sport, everything is measurable and visual, so you have something to anchor to. There wouldn't be a time any high performance athlete isn’t wearing a device to track their movement and physiological signals, which you can see in real time,” says Scott Drawer, director of sport at Millfield School. A typical Olympic athlete today is surrounded by a team of coaches and experts, from physiologists to nutritionists, whose sole task is to improve athletic performance.
Watch the full panel discussion above or on YouTube here.
In January 2011, Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly and Company announced an Alliance that centers on compounds representing several of the largest diabetes treatment classes. Depending on geographies, the companies either co-promote or separately promote the respective molecules each contributing to the Alliance. The Alliance leverages the strengths of two of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies to focus on patient needs. By joining forces, the companies demonstrate their commitment, not only to the care of people with diabetes, but also to investigating the potential to address areas of unmet medical need. Clinical trials have been initiated to evaluate the impact of empagliflozin on people living with heart failure or chronic kidney disease.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
