To see or not to see the problem that we have in Health Care
Here’s the thing about the elephant in the room: Everyone can see it. Everyone knows it’s there. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. In fact, the more you ignore it, the bigger it gets.
The best way to shrink the elephant — any type of elephant — is to say, “Hey, look, there’s an elephant over here!”
Until today the governments, countries, or any other person who has the decision power was focused to develop bigger and more expensive hospitals. Like in the energy industry, building bigger plants, more expensive systems to generate energy seemed to be the only way. But a decade ago people in the energy business see that creating decentralized small girds can solve bigger problems in energy supply, and combining it with energy efficiency will make energy costs less expensive.
Why don’t we use that approach in health care?
Creating affordable, accessible decentralized medical imaging hubs for faster diagnostics and monitoring of critical injuries and diseases can help people to access decent health care and help doctors to stay connected with their patients all the time.
Q: If a doctor gave you or the person you care for a specialized remote health monitoring device that was only used for your chronic condition, would you wear it?
Three-fourths of patients with a Chronic condition would wear or use a remote monitoring device offered by their doctor.
The patient receives her scan while she is at home and simultaneously the doctor also gets the scans in real-time and while she is at home her results are already available. An alert is sent directly to the ordering provider via an app on their phone that Ms. Jones does in fact have multiple PE’s. Treatment options are arranged, and the patient is treated and picked up by the ambulance and brought to the hospital. Maybe the ER doc takes a quick look at the chest CT and while scrolling through she can see where the AI has pointed out the pulmonary emboli. Part of the algorithm will also analyze osseous structures, the heart, lung parenchyma, etc. and point out abnormalities, and provide clinical and radiologic recommendations, instantly. Anything unrecognizable to the system will be flagged and sent to the 1–2 hospital-employed radiologists for analysis. This will be many at first but the numbers will forever decrease as years progress because machine learning systems are inherently initially hypersensitive.
Decentralized medical imaging hubs will improve the speed of treatment, reducing the number of patients taken to the hospital and relieving strain on hospital ER resources. next-generation connectivity could free up 10.1 million hours per year for the hospitals, as well as saving cities $1B per year and decreasing overall bed occupancy rates by 6% through the adoption of wearing monitoring devices.
We spot the elephant, we won’t ignore it.
The elephant, like the rest of us, just wants to be seen.
