ABHI at 30 Guest Blogs. Turning Obstacles into Milestones: The Role of Technology in Facing Today’s Healthcare Challenges
As the CEO of a health technology company and board member of the ABHI, I can confidently say that technology has a crucial role to play in enabling better care for patients and supporting the long-term future of the NHS. My belief and passion is shared by health officials and those in senior Government; for example Lord Darzi’s Review of Health and Care (June 2018) called for a comprehensive strategy to harness 21st century technology and innovation at pace. Similarly, the Government has pledged an additional £20.5 billion to the NHS over the next five years, citing technology as a key component to drive productivity and disease prevention.
At Philips we constantly evaluate how technology can help improve people’s health and wellness, and where we should focus our attention to support as many people as possible while never overlooking those who need specialist care. We are not alone in asking these questions – our sector colleagues discuss similar topics on a daily basis. From the perspective of Philips in the UK there are some pressing challenges we are committed to taking on, to ensure people live well and the NHS continues as a global innovator.
System capacity and preventative care
One considerable challenge we currently face is capacity in the healthcare system, and I believe that health provision needs to increase the pace of its journey toward a ‘predict and prevent’ model to redress this. With the evolution of medical knowledge to-date, our health system has had to ‘treat illness.’
The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, treating patients once illness is established means a more-costly intervention, possibly within an acute-setting. Secondly, the more advanced the illness the bigger the toll on the patient and their loved ones, with less favourable outcomes. As technology unlocks new possibilities and knowledge at a blistering pace, we have an opportunity to revolutionise healthcare by using advanced methods of information collection and analysis to move the model to a front-loaded, lower-cost system.
Part of meeting this challenge is to seize an opportunity – our ability to use technology to prevent illness. At Philips we are committed to improving seven billion lives by 2025, and I believe that the integration of information across personal and clinical devices can help establish a preventative system that is focused on, tailored to, and powered by motivated users. Preventative health incorporates two core elements; health maintenance – ensuring the body is in sustained good health – and early detection – identifying disease early to increase the chances of getting the best possible outcomes from treatment. If we can evolve our current system to a coherent, evidence based, model of care that supports people to remain well, I believe the positive impact on society and individuals will be considerable.
Philips is determined to help future-proof the NHS, so we are constantly looking for ways to use information to improve care delivery. For instance, we are working with NHS partners to establish digital pathology networks as a way to reduce inter-observer variance and increase diagnostic speed across care sites. The net result should be earlier patient diagnosis, reduced treatment costs and improved outcomes. Our experiences to-date have been extremely positive and we are working hard with Government to help provide these benefits to as many people as possible. Another example is our TissueMark system, which quantifies samples and informs the pathologist whether there is sufficient tumour material for robust analysis or whether more samples are required. This large-scale data matching exercise is something the human mind cannot do, and it helps ensure that the patient experience remains paramount with each procedure only being as invasive as it absolutely has to be.
Across all our work Philips is committed to collaboration, as our technology in isolation can only do so much. An organisation like the ABHI offers access to a forum of 30-years expertise, in which challenges and experiences can be worked through collaboratively, in a non-partisan fashion, to ensure better healthcare for patients and professionals alike.
As a proud member and champion of the ABHI, I value its contribution to our healthcare system and our society.
Neil Mesher, CEO, Philips UK and Ireland