With technology and new research advances unlocking new horizons in preventative healthcare, Patrick Dey, Vice President, Global Head of Digital Health & Innovation at Amgen, shares his thoughts on a pivotal moment in healthcare tech.
While healthcare systems across the globe continue to strain under challenges such as the increasing prevalence of chronic disease, an aging population and growing healthcare costs, we’ve been asking the same questions since I first joined the healthcare sector 18 years ago: How can healthcare be better, faster, easier, and more affordable?
Technology solutions, in collaboration with the right partners and leveraging integrated approaches, can help unlock new insights to bring novel therapies to patients who need them, shifting us from what we know as reactive “sick care” to proactive, preventative health care.
Consider a glimpse into the future with the following hypothetical scenario. Chris is an average 50-something man living with heart disease. Aside from lifestyle changes and taking medication, Chris’s doctors can remotely monitor heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns and physical activity using information from Chris’s digital watch.
Like many of us, Chris doesn’t always eat right, get enough rest or remember to take his medicines. One day, Chris’s doctor receives a notification that there was a spike in his heart rate, despite his history of low physical activity. Calling Chris to come into the office for a follow-up appointment, his doctor finds a significant, life-threatening blockage in an artery after examining him. Thanks to real-time data made available via Chris’s digital watch, his doctor can have additional information and choose to intervene to prevent an imminent heart attack, such as suggesting a routine stent procedure and a change in medications.
Chris’ story is becoming our emerging reality—and one I can personally relate to as both a technologist and patient. Three years ago, I had a routine health screening that uncovered a serious, but treatable heart condition. My doctor, with help from basic, predictive diagnostics powered by novel technologies, saved my life, and have the ability to save the lives of patients all over the world, not to mention millions of dollars by preventing emergency health interventions.
Our current healthcare system focuses on “sick care”: treating people after they’ve had a significant health event, or, once the damage is done. Technology can shift this focus, by keeping people as healthy as possible and warding off the manifestation of disease. Real-time decision-making and personalized treatment have the power to improve quality of life for patients suffering from chronic disease reducing costs through smarter investments in prevention.
We also know patients spend most of their time outside of a doctor’s office without medical supervision. And when they are inside a doctor’s office, the baseline data and health risk screening abilities can be limited with a one-size-fits-all approach. Leveraging digital health innovations can create a more connected, agile, personalized health ecosystem – bringing providers and patients closer.
Recently, Amgen launched a digital health monitoring study in collaboration with major academic groups and health care providers, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Inova Heart and Vascular Institute and others, deploying digital solutions in a wearable device to help assess whether making real-time data available to physicians will improve treatment decisions for patients with heart failure. Wearable digital devices will monitor patients’ heart rate, blood pressure, and activity. The real-time data may help physicians make better informed, tailored, evidence-based heart failure treatment decisions. Our hope is that this study, if successful, will be a model to help improve access to clinically effective and evidence-based care, with the potential to improve patient outcomes for other chronic conditions, while reducing cost of care.
I’ve seen first-hand how advancements in technology have dramatically changed what’s possible. The rise of new data analytics techniques – artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning – gives us the potential to improve these complex dynamics for patients and health systems throughout the patient journey. But achieving a new healthcare reality is going to take vision, dedication and strong collaboration with partners both within and outside of the healthcare sector. I hope that in the very near future, every patient will have the same chance at avoiding a critical health event as Chris, leveraging technology to help prevent and treat disease through agile and personalized means.
Learn more about how Amgen is building a better biotech at www.amgen.com.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Amgen.
