We wanted to engage people and bring experts together who are at the cutting edge of their different areas whether they are the industry innovators or the academics researching key areas of chronic care, or the regulators who are trying to keep up with these technologies and who help to provide safety and assurance and comfort for patients as well as moving these possible innovations to market. We also brought in the clinicians who need to be at the table. We wanted to ensure a mutual sharing between these different communities. Only by sharing can we fully and effectively harness the potential value of healthcare data and innovation more generally.
Digital Health Forum January 2017
18 Jan 2017
12:00 -20:00
GMT
By invitation only
Cambridge Judge Business School
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Transforming Lives by Innovating Healthcare
All fields of medicine are going through a Digital Health revolution. The impact of patients becoming more informed through researching their own conditions online before they see their GP, or improving their own health by using wearables to monitor how many steps they take each day, or how much sugar they consume, is now being felt in all fields of medicine.
The Digital Health Forum brings together senior industry practitioners, policy leaders and academics embedded in the digital health ecosystem to discuss digital innovation and data in healthcare, management, policy and clinical service delivery. Digital Health Forum events are co-hosted by Cambridge Digital Innovation and Warwick Business School.
Setting the scene
The GP patient relationship is undergoing a transformation and science fiction is fast becoming science fact. It is no longer a top down paternalistic relationship but one where the GP and patient are collaborating to determine health conditions and treatments. But it is not just at the frontline of medicine that these relationships are undergoing change. Consultants, surgeons, health managers, and those planning the future of health services and commissioning them are having to adapt to the concept of digital health becoming more commonly embedded in health practices.
At the forefront of these changes is the ability to harvest and aggregate data to predict health outcomes and improve lives. Concepts such as harvesting data are still relatively new and may give rise to concerns that a patients privacy will be invaded or that the data itself maybe unreliable. Other issues such as affordability may arise as new systems and working practices are introduced.
On a positive note, online health communities of like-minded individuals are not only providing patients with support from others but they are also helping to pioneer and alleviate the very health problems these individuals suffer from.
Advances such as 3D printing might offer new opportunities for value based health but it also requires patients and practitioners to accept these changes, and adapt accordingly.
The National healthcare strategy calls for the increasing use of digital innovation to promote care in the community but there may well be regional differences in practices particularly the speed of change that allow the health community to learn from and support each other in these new and sometimes challenging practices which have the potential to produce savings to the health budget.
2020 is only three years away but as the march of change continues in healthcare in the UK and all over the World, digital innovations will become more embedded in patient practitioner relationships, and policy makers will need to keep up to date with these changes to plan for the provision of services.
New methods of governance and new ecosystems will need to be planned for and additional scrutiny will be required. New informed regulations will need to be introduced and if framed properly will help to increase reliability and the speed of adoption of these changes.
The Digital Health Forum brought together senior medical practitioners, NHS administrators, policy leaders and health innovators, both from the lab and from the online communities now forming, to discuss these topical issues.
Key messages for event organisers
For me the chronic care conditions that are being increasingly supported by online communities, where the power of fellow patients is helping to facilitate value of experiential data on a day to day basis is creating active, sticky and strong communities of trusted exchanges, which patients really value. This is an amazing opportunity for patients to share and for the owners and moderators of these communities to understand and analyse through analytics ways in which they can further help those patients through different services that they need and in a proactive manner.
Digital health is a different way of working and it requires a different mind -set from the one we are used to in health, which has been based on one way of working. But we have slowly and incrementally been changing. We have become more collaborative, and more willing to partner between organisations. What we really want to do is devise a new way of working that changes our mentality from a linear value chain to thinking about a digital platform as enabling a new host of values. Different kinds of values that we never thought about before and this implies not just collaboration with different stakeholders but completely new kinds of collaborations and collaborations for different reasons and different purposes and a different kind of energy. Digital health is not just a sharing of ideas but it is actually generating new ways of thinking. New ways of understanding knowledge not just developing medical knowledge to research but also thinking about Artificial Intelligence or analytics and big data, or seeing patterns to predict who might be having a particular health issue in the future and working in a proactive manner. We have traditionally been very reactive, we fix the problem, but by harnessing analytics through platforms we can potentially understand what kind of services might be needed in the future before we are there.
We have already eradicated a number of health conditions that is not new. The challenge is as we eradicate some conditions other ones follow on because we still have an ageing population and we still have more intervention in our health as we manage our health. If we are living longer and we end up with more chronic diseases it will take more ongoing management of these diseases. Instead of thinking of managing the big ones – the arthritis, the cancers the heart conditions – our kidneys will still continue to fail, our hearts will continue to fail, but our management of the symptoms will greatly improve. We should therefore have a better quality of life because the morbidity associated with these illnesses should improve even if the conditions remain underlying.
Privacy is always a big issue and challenge – understanding how we can share and integrate data that are patient based. I think there are ways now that technologies can be secure enough, to address the privacy issues, and at the same time enable better interaction between different stakeholders that would enable them both to create and capture value from that data. We need to have integrated standards and common protocols that enable us to create standards. By solving the standards issue and the challenge of standards I think we can also solve the security issue and manage the privacy of patient data.
By having more information about chronic conditions and by being proactive and by having more informed patients by enabling patients to carry out more healthy lives we will definitely minimise the challenges of managing those conditions.
Event organisers
Michael Barrett
Academic Director, Cambridge Digital Innovation
Michael is Professor of IS and Innovation Studies and Director of Research at Cambridge Judge Business School. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of Innovation at the Stockholm School of Economics. He has served as Head of the Organisation Theory & Information Systems group, Director (Associate Dean) of Programmes, and Director of the MPhil in Innovation, Strategy & Organisation programme. He is also a Distinguished Scholar, OCIS Division, Academy of Management. Professor Barrett is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Information & Organization journal responsible for the RICK section. He has consulted with Oracle Canada where he won the Most Valuable Employee award. He continues to provide executive education for many organisations including Thomson Reuters, Statoil, Bank of China, China Mobile, BT, IBM, HP, PWC, Pfizer, Shell, and the World Health Organisation.
Professor Eivor Oborn
Professor of Healthcare Management, Warwick Business School
