No low-hanging fruit: Experts offer their four big ideas for changing health care
If you could offer an idea to transform health care, what would you say?
Four health care leaders took the stage at the STAT Health Tech Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday to take on that assignment. He proposed a strategy ranging from finding new ways to power health equipment to addressing the legacy of racism in health care. Many of his suggestions involved large-scale institutional changes.
One of the panelists, Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, acknowledged that none of them would be easy to execute.
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“Enough hanging fruit? I haven’t seen any in health care,” Wachter said.
Here were the thoughts of some health care leaders.
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What if health tech companies could use the human body to power tools?
Health care leaders in patient care and monitoring are increasingly using tablets, wearable monitors, even iPhones as tools. But what happens when these devices need to be charged? This is a common thread across all pitches that Andreessen Horowitz general partner Julie Yu hears.
“Being on the receiving end of many” [remote patient monitoring] And wearable pitches, you look at the fact that one of the biggest contributors to the lack of compliance on the patient’s side with these longitudinal measurement programs is the need to recharge their device all the time,” she said.
It’s not an easy fix. Lithium, the metal used in many types of batteries, is in short supply as it is being used more than ever before to power electric cars, cellphones and other technology. The process of extracting it from underground has not improved much over the years.
Researchers are looking for ways to store and translate body heat into energy. “Imagine if, one day you could basically plug your wearable into your body and actually charge it itself based on your daily movements,” Yu said.
Health care needs to learn from the ‘moneyball’ and invest in data analysis
The watcher’s job involves saving lives. But he sometimes gets into fights with his son, who works for the Atlanta Braves, whose workplace works better. That’s because Major League Baseball teams use data to improve their performance every day, while many hospitals thought their digital innovation was done when they adopted electronic health records a decade ago.
That attitude still needs to change, Wachter said. Every hospital should have a branch dedicated to digital health (UCSF Health launched its Digital Health Innovation Center in 2013). Those teams of doctors, along with data experts in the hospital, must work with companies to transform health care.
“All these things that are happening in the VC world, in the startup world, and at Google, and it’s all fantastic. But you have to interact with us. And part of that is on you. Part of that is on us. The digital world In order to be innovative, we have to reorganize ourselves.”
How can we overcome medical mistrust? ‘Brown skin and white coat don’t always equal trust’
Right now, we have a huge opportunity to use technology to improve people’s health. But if the health care industry doesn’t take the time to rebuild patient trust, it won’t be much, said Onduo CEO and Verily Health Platform’s chief clinical officer.
Distrust is widespread in patient populations, but it is particularly acute in black communities – a result of events that happened decades ago. Men were still being enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a government-run study, when Washington was still in elementary school. The battle over Henrietta Lacks’ cell line continues to this day.
It is not easy to rebuild lost trust in the health care system. “If you look at the decades it took to develop this distrust, just because I had a great experience and provided culturally competent care last Thursday, it doesn’t mean that when I show up at the clinic next week, So all those trust areas have been undermined,” Washington said. “Brown skin and a white coat doesn’t always equal trust.”
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‘We have to test’: a Google AI leader on why it’s important to move slowly in health tech
Health care professionals need to be patient and take incremental steps, Washington said: Be transparent about what you are doing, the mistakes that have been made, and how you are trying to do better.
US needs to learn from UK’s anonymous health data programs
If Insitro founder and CEO Daphne Koller wishes, it would be so that patients with health problems in the US and those who wish to share their health data, have the opportunity to choose to share that data, so that it can help them find new treatments. can help create.
This is already happening in the United Kingdom. Koller said researchers from the UK’s Biobank, Our Future Health Program and among other data repositories, will have access to harmonized and anonymized data from millions of people.
So far, efforts to replicate those data collection initiatives in the US have resulted in closed pools of data available to relatively small groups of researchers and scientists. “The data is moving around in little silos that nobody really has for the purpose of driving research or innovation,” Koller said.
Building AI and machine learning tools like Insitro relies on high-quality, diverse data. But persuading people to hand over their data, and that it is secure, is an issue that could hinder algorithms.
“It’s a really important place where trust is both a positive or a negative feedback loop, because I think the challenge of machine learning [system] It’s really representative of the population, really ensuring that datasets are representative of the population, and if some subset of the population isn’t being relied upon enough to create data repositories that capture their unique medical condition, then You are going to have AI that is biased towards some subset and will never be representative,” Koeller said. “And so I think this is a place where one has to build trust in order to produce artifacts that are already convincing.”
