According to a new report of Lux Research, a market research firm, emerging digital technologies are poised to create a new paradigm for healthcare by creating common solutions and establishing connections between seemingly unrelated medical conditions, transforming healthcare traditionally grouped by anatomy and disease specialties.
Lux Research established a disease-connection framework by identifying six key facets of digital health – monitoring, diagnostics, predictive analytics, therapeutics, assistive technology, and behaviour augmentation. This framework uncovered more than 65 unique connections among 12 seemingly unrelated conditions with a wide range of causes, symptoms and severity levels.
“The ability to track and gain insight into new streams of information marks a pivotal shift in how clinical decisions will be made. Digital health solutions will transform medicine, using data to help manage several conditions that on the surface may seem very different from one another,” said Noa Ghersin, Lux Research Associate and lead author of the report titled, ‘A byte a day: How digital health redraws health care and uncovers opportunities’.
Lux Research analysts built a digital health framework, and re-imagined the future hospital, outlining changes in supply chains and technology development. Of all diseases studied in this report, epilepsy is the most connected with 17 ties to other conditions. Even if no solution specific to epilepsy exists, technologies developed for other conditions may be applicable with minor or no modification.
Cardiovascular disease is diagnosed through different tests, including electrocardiogram (ECG), echocardiogram, cardiac catheterisation, and imaging tests like CT and MRI. Today, consumer wearable devices and band-aid-like medical wearables enable monitoring of heart beat, smoking habits, or calorific intake, and even deliver a treatment shock to restore normal heart rhythm when necessary.
“A fully mature diagnostic technology does not exist for any condition studied in this report, leaving room for new players to tap into the diagnostics space. Digital diagnostics of diarrhoeal disease, skin cancer, and hearing loss are often software-based, as they rely on hardware built into users’ mobile devices to capture non-specific data (sounds, images) for disease-specific analysis,” said Lux Research in a press release.
