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New tools and technologies are already starting to make waves across the healthcare system and hold great promise to transform the delivery of health services in the near future – improving efficiency and bettering patient care. What impact might they have as they shape the future of healthcare?

1. Improving diagnosis

Technology has the potential to provide doctors the ability to speed up and improve their diagnostic capabilities by better managing information flow. Increasingly powerful computing tools will help filter, sort and organize the massive amounts of information already being collected in electronic health records so that a patient’s most important health problem becomes visible more quickly. This will subsequently help physicians to more quickly arrive at an accurate diagnosis.

These technologies may also allow doctors, hospitals and health systems to sift through the vast data in their health databases to more accurately measure diagnostic errors, and then potentially reduce the chance of these errors recurring in the future.

2. More convenient delivery

Mobile health (mHealth) applications and wearable technologies have the potential to transform healthcare delivery thanks to their ubiquity and ease of use. Smartphones are already being leveraged as a practical health tool; for example, in conjunction with specialized attachments to make certain laboratory-based diagnostics for infectious diseases available at home or the point of care.

Remote applications extend to other specifically-designed wearable devices such as a patch-like smart device that can continuously yet unobtrusively monitor body temperature; a pair of smart glasses or a phone camera to show a sighted person the real-time visual surroundings of a visually-impaired person in order to talk them through whatever situation they’re in. All of these applications make gathering data and monitoring patients easier and more convenient.

3. Advancing personalized care 

The increase in available data, testing capabilities and cutting edge technologies mean that we may finally be entering the long-promised golden age of personalized healthcare. By better understanding an individual’s genetic profile, more effective therapies can be used. In the future, before treating any woman for breast cancer for example, a genetic test could determine what genetic variations are present. The physician would then prescribe a treatment that is specifically designed to be most effective for that patient.

Genetic editing has also become a realistic treatment option, thanks to CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). CRISPR allows researchers to easily alter DNA sequences and modify gene functions to potentially correct genetic defects and treat – or even prevent – certain diseases. It also has promise in the treatment of cancer by targeting cancer-causing genes.

4. Advancing access to healthcare services

Digital health can be a powerful enabler to improve healthcare outcomes in areas where skilled health professionals are limited. This is especially true in rural or remote locations in developing countries, which are half as likely to have access to care as their urban counterparts. Telehealth can play an essential role by connecting patients directly to doctors in faraway health facilities, providing a valuable link to the healthcare system without undue burden. Using mobile technology to centralize expertise also helps avoid unnecessary referrals and reduces costs for patients.

5. Improving drug discovery and clinical development

Digital solutions such as clinical trial simulation, modelling and simulation, computer-assisted trial design, model-based drug development and model-informed drug discovery and development could also begin to replace certain lab experiments, with a goal to reduce the time and resources required to bring a medicine to market.

Technology is enabling the collection of far richer and more diverse information such as data on activity, sleep, vitals, circadian rhythm, behaviour, speech, and more. This real world data can be used as digital biomarkers to help determine the most responsive subpopulation in a clinical trial, improving execution and possibly trial outcomes.

6. Improving financial outcomes and increasing value 

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are making great strides in medical imaging, speeding up diagnoses and allowing radiologists to focus on higher value added tasks. AI can look at vast numbers of medical images to more quickly and regularly identify patterns, including variations that humans cannot. This may not only improve patient outcomes, but also save money – earlier diagnosis and treatment of many cancers, for example, can cut treatment costs by more than 50%.

7. Streamlining healthcare services and driving operational effectiveness

Increasing use of automation to reduce the burden of clinical documentation – extremely time consuming for most doctors – has been demonstrated to not only save time, but also potentially improve outcomes for patients. Speech recognition technology may also play a role in helping physicians record clinical documentation more efficiently, and improve the speed of results reporting. The ongoing implementation of 5G mobile networks worldwide could create the first wave of surgeons performing robotic operations from distant locations.