Jersey’s Digital HEALTH POTENTIAL By Mark Loane, CEO of C5 Alliance.
The American entrepreneur Jim Rohn famously said “take care of your body, it’s the only place you have to live.” Another one of his well-known quips is “Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better.” Taking these two ideas – that our health is central to everything else, and that we will only improve our healthcare by taking action – underpins the work of MedTech professionals. In fact, MedTech solutions not only make us better, they make effective healthcare delivery easier.
It’s a truism hardly worth repeating that technology has changed everything; how we communicate, how we work, how we spend our free time, how we relate to one another. What’s striking though is how technology hasn’t yet had this degree of impact on that most central part of our existence: our healthcare. We can monitor and feed how many miles we’ve run into an app, but not our heartbeat to our doctor. We can access all of our banking data online, but not the data about our medical history.
This dissonance is of course partly explained by the sheer size of healthcare systems, which makes implementing innovation slow and subject to many layers of bureaucratic checks. On top of this, we’re naturally cautious about changing the way healthcare is delivered; it’s such a fundamental aspect of our lives that anything new needs to be tried and tested repeatedly. Paradoxically, this risk aversion is actually detrimental to our healthcare – reducing the individual’s control over their own healthcare, and making us miss out on key opportunities for preventative care. Digital healthcare will alert physicians of problems long before symptoms emerge, enabling us to act quickly to save lives.
At a time when budget constraints are putting significant pressure on healthcare, and where we have the challenges of an aging population and increasing demands on the health service they will use, we need to think innovatively about where we can increase both efficiency and quality of care.
This is where digital health steps in. Far from being a cold, impersonal imposition on a sector that should be about human care, digital health solutions actually empower individuals and provide them with treatment that is
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specifically tailored to them. No two people are the same, and no two people have identical needs from their healthcare. By employing data driven healthcare solutions, we can provide people with care that is totally responsive and totally individual.
Digital health solutions are now enabling individuals to feed in their healthcare data to interactive, secure platforms; for those
with cardiovascular issues this may be their heart rate, for diabetic patients a continued monitoring of their blood sugar levels and for those without conditions, a monitor of their general health to ensure that if something is going wrong it gets detected. With certain illnesses, by the time symptoms are presenting themselves, it makes treatment much harder.
In light of the current challenges of Jersey’s healthcare system, and the opportunities that digital solutions present, a group of medical, digital and innovation specialists in Jersey have converged to drive forward healthcare innovation in Jersey with the recently formed
MedTech.je, of which C5 is a member. Jersey’s size is a key advantage for our work; it enables unrivalled connectivity between the industries needed to bring digital solutions to life, and makes us an ideal test-bed for the latest innovations.
A big focus for MedTech companies in Jersey is the effective storing and use of data. Data sharing and data ownership are two closely related ideas. The idea of data ownership is that patients should own and have access to their health data; it belongs to them and only they should have the say over who sees that data. Currently it is very difficult for patients to access all of their health data as its held over several disparate systems, mitigating any sense of ownership.
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