Medicine and the Future

Most common problems of modern medicine are known to be: the inaccessibility of health services to the population, the uneven distribution of qualified doctors, and the lack of an integrated approach.

Nevertheless, we believe that medical services will become more technological, more massive, more interactive and more social in the near future.

One of the aids to make health services more accessible are mobile phones and their associated applications - on the one hand, ensuring the supervision of specialists in those areas where there is not enough, on the other hand, bringing medicine into every home. Familiar and accessible devices will be easier to understand – since a majority of patient is not familiar with medical terms the data only means little to them. Many laboratories and clinics do not have the right to transfer test results to the patient and, additionally, the transfer makes no sense due to their complexity. The magazine Wired (first magazine to publish an interactive article as iPad app) criticizes the traditional format of medical records and demands that we have the right to know what's going on in our body, and therefore should be offered clear information.

The data should be recorded so as to be convenient and clear for both doctor and patient, medical record could be completed online, and the results of surveys should be accessible from your tablet at home. Furthermore, there should be a possibility in the same program to enter data of well-being or symptoms when they appear.

For instance, the Patientslikeme project was created when one of its founders was diagnosed with ALS. His family thought about whether they could improve the quality of his life and how it can be done. Based on this experience, a website was created where everyone could share how they themselves cope with their illness and their knowledge about how it can be overcome. The project laid the foundations for crowdsourcing in medicine: if you structure the stories of patients, a clear system can be formed from them and it will allow everyone to find their diagnosis. But, above all, it will help to answer the main question - " what is the best outcome I can expect and what do I do to achieve it. "

In order to understand how the website is structured watch the TED talk video.

Modern medicine has succeeded in treating infectious diseases, but everything that relates to chronicle diseases - from depression to cancer - has not progressed that far. From a pragmatic point of view, these diseases are expensive, the prognosis is poor, plus the patient requires daily care. A diabetic patient has, for example, not only the restriction on not having anything sweet each day, but every day of their lives they have to measure their blood pressure, blood sugar levels and they have to take medication, based on their vital signs. Chronicle patients visit their doctors, at best, once a month, while they actually would need a doctor every day to monitor health, receive feedback, monitor the administration of drugs and provide treatment. In contrast to the healthy people, who need to lose a little bit of weight or lower blood pressure, chronically ill patients need for more radical changes in their lives and the participation of various experts. A part of these procedures can be replaced by a program called the EMR (electronical medical record), which is becoming more prevalent. For example, Fitbit or DirectLife collect the necessary information about the pressure, weight, blood sugar and send it to a machine, which summarizes the findings and makes a Google Health record. (Google Health is being retired since it did not catch on)

Medical technologies continue to evolve, but this does not mean that hospitals will cease to exist or their role will diminish. Clinics will be more multi-functional, flexible and will be equipped with a variety of media technologies, such as the hospital 2020.