A Doctor’s Vision of the Future of Medicine

Technology is an advantage that the U.S. has over other countries. We continually grow technologically. The market (or individuals) responds to needs, or respond to profit potential.

When a third of the country elect to have government health insurance, there would be potential for anyone to open a MRI clinic, Asthma clinic, genetic diagnostic clinics, etc. if there is a demand. All they would have to do is hire an expert and get funding from SBA, banks, or investors. Then they would send the billing to the government (capitalism works).

I wonder why other countries are not so responsive to consumer demand; to solve problems.

Excellent article. This will be the next revolution in healthcare akin to how antibiotics and infection control brought modern medicine out out of the dark ages in the 1930s and how rapid production of effective medicines by pharmaceutical manufacturers has sustained it since. Unfortunately it may take longer than 10 years for this to be realized. I was thinking more like 30. Of course this pleasant and cost effective reality can happen sooner if the federal government invests resources appropriately for this kind of technology and applications of it can be developed sooner. considering the healtcare debate now going on, this type of change to the system has the potential to lower health care costs enormously once these panels and assays are minaturized.

It's all about preventive medicine. Our doctor's treat diseases not patients. If we lived healthier, we'd be healthiier, but most doctors aren't trained that way.

The advances in medicine have been amazing, but if no one can afford them...they don't really matter. My father who suffers from night blindness recently bought these new kind of contact lenses from this company called RanchCorp. They allow him to see at night. He could actually drive without his headlights on...but then other people wouldn't be able to see him, so he doesn't. They work like night vision goggles, but without the odd bright green color. They're pretty astounding. But they're very expensive. Insurance doesn't cover them. We can create technologies that allow people to see in the dark, but we can't keep people from dying from pneumonia...

I like your P4 approach to thinking about the future of medical care. In my book ???The Future of Medicine ??? Megatrends in Healthcare,??? I offered a somewhat similar approach. After interviewing over 150 medical leaders from across the USA, I distilled their thoughts down to this. Five major megatrends will develop over the coming years ??? custom-tailored medicine [I think custom-tailored is a better descriptor than personalized medicine although I recognize the latter is used more frequently]; the advent of much more preventive care; improved abilities to repair, restore or replace organs, tissues or cells; digitized medical information leading to your medical record available anytime, anyplace; and much improved safety with many fewer preventable errors and deaths.
Driving these megatrends are advances in basic science such as genomics, stem cells, immunology and vaccinology along with advances in engineering and computer science giving us medical devices such as the cardiac defibrillator, new approaches to ???X-rays??? such as molecular imaging, new techniques in the OR such as simulation and robotics; and the digital medical record. Your readers might like to visit www.medicalmegatrends.com