Should innovation be limited or confined to a category? We have all heard the categories assigned to innovation. The terms disruptive, sustaining and transformative have become colloquial terms in defining innovation. The landscape and macro industry goal of improvement creates a culture that embraces collaboration to achieve success. And New York, for one, is a microcosm that welcomes the concept of merging ideas to produce actionable results that improve quality of life.
At a recent healthcare conference, attendees were offered unique, interactive opportunities to explore solutions to address current unmet needs. Participants were immersed in a competitive, yet complimentary environment, which served to highlight the importance of bringing minds together to cultivate and produce truly innovative services and products. Innovators shared critical advances in precision medicine, leveraging big data and overcoming barriers in telehealth. The solutions not only improved options for care providers, but also enabled patients to actively participate in their treatment. As such, innovation promotes quality care while maintaining human dignity for improved overall care.
We’ll Get There Together
“While many are in continuous pursuit of innovation in healthcare and technology, too many concepts are sadly still tactical and transactional without any true attempt at integration,” Mario R. Nacinovich, Jr. MSc, Managing Partner at AXON Communications, stated during the conference. “In the future, we must consider a more integrated and much more holistic approach to improve patient diagnoses, management and outcomes. With the right insights, talent and investments we will all get there together—this requires a best teams approach rooted in collaboration.”
Emerging trends formulate knowledge in new ways. We are leveraging big data and novel research methods to support telehealth. Virtual expertise supports the equation of access, quality and cost. Telehealth mitigates cost by reducing hospital readmissions, while providing quality care and increasing access for remote areas. Geographic and language barriers are eliminated and quickly replaced with opportunities to improve outcomes.
The historic disparate nature of payers, providers, labs and pharmacies, and the inherent complexity of data, create successful data integration barriers. Healthcare data, such as text documents and images, tend to be unstructured and multi-dimensional. While big data and analytics enable HCPs to understand disease state and patients’ needs, the quality of the raw data and manipulated or derived data must be considered. True data integration requires collaboration to promote a transparent story of disease patterns to improve public health strategy.
Precision medicine now transforms care by integrating data from the human genome, molecular research, patients’ health records, and environmental data while also considering variability in genes, environment and lifestyle. This individualized approach to treatment may improve how we manage diseases overall—as well as improve patient outcomes.
We are approaching an apex in the journey of conceptualization to implementation. Progressive methods of providing care are evolving to reduce bacterial and viral infections, while eliminating concerns for antimicrobial resistance through holograms and new molecular compound formulas. Leaders are also investing in wireless monitoring, implanted nanobots that function as cells, human tissue regeneration, and resources for virtual training modules that allow an immersion in tactical learning, such as virtual cadavers and robotic surgery simulations. Innovation has become a necessity for brands and companies to not only thrive, but also to simply survive.
