How the Healthcare Industry Will Evolve in the Coming Years
We
are at a critical point in the history of healthcare, where old
technologies are beginning to fail but new ones are rapidly entering
the market. One thing that can be said with certainty is that
healthcare in 20 years’ time will not look the same as it does
today. Some of the diseases we have most feared – cancer, heart
disease, stroke, dementia – will be much easier to treat than they
are today, but new diseases will emerge that pose a serious theat.
The industry is gearing itself up for the challenge.
The
developing threat from disease
There
have always been people working in medicine whose job it is to
monitor the emergence of new diseases around the world, but their job
has never been more urgent. As people have begun to travel around the
globe more frequently, diseases have begun to spread more easily. Of
particular concern is flu, which may often be thought of as a minor
affliction but which killed 50 to 100 million people in 1918. Annual
vaccinations are available for the vulnerable, and researchers
believe they are close to finding a way of attacking the core of the
flu organism rather than the parts that mutate, but it’s a race
against time.
Alongside
this, medicine faces another serious challenge. Over-use of
antibiotics, especially in agriculture, means that common diseases
are evolving to become immune to them and they are losing their
effectiveness. This isn’t a big deal for the average healthy person
in day-to-day life, but it could place elderly and chronically ill
people at serious risk, and could make chemotherapy and surgery of
all kinds much more dangerous than it is today. Researchers are
working hard to try to develop new ones before it’s too late.
New
moves in medical research
With
all this going on, researchers are under serious pressure, and
politicians and business experts are looking for better ways of
funding their work. Recently, a new fund has been launched that will
provide an immediate reward for any company succeeding in bringing a
new antibiotic to the market, helping to cover the financial risks
involved in developing lots of drugs that may or may not prove to be
effective when they reach the testing stage.
Researchers
are also working hard to find new ways of tackling mental illness,
which affects at least 10 million Americans and can increase the risk
of problems such as heart disease and stroke.
Technology
and the healthcare business
Part
of what is driving advancement both within the research industry and
in day-to-day medical practice is the development of parallel
technologies. These include things such as software to identify
at-risk patients more easily and streamline preventative measures,
and low-cost portable devices that members of the public can use to
monitor their own health. Innovators and investors such as Marcia
Radosevich have been at the forefront of this, identifying areas
where technological development is needed and helping to bring the
two industries together. To find out more about her work look at
Marcia
Radosevich online,
and you can learn more about how Radosevich has funded several
start-ups focused on building partnerships of this kind and enabling
medicine to reach its goals more easily.
A
healthier society
Alongside
all these technological changes, there are social changes that have
the potential to make the population healthier. Everyone knows that
they should aim to eat healthier food and get more exercise, but it
can take social change to actualize this – for instance, community
groups organizing sports events or campaigning to preserve space for
exercise and play within the urban environment. Similarly, businesses
are beginning to get organized around the health of their workers,
realizing that they are more productive overall if they take action
to reduce stress in the workplace so that staff need fewer sick days.
Health has never been such a big priority, and actions such as these
can help to keep people in shape to face the healthcare challenges of
the future.