Читать книгу The Future of Health - Roberto Ascione - Страница 19

AI and ML have transformed the travel industry, which went from brick-and-mortar travel agencies to search engines and aggregators that can suggest the best values and prices. They've also disrupted the music business, which has moved from albums in the record store to songs in apps and digital platforms. Transforming the world of health care is something else entirely because it is a theme that touches our very humanity. Today we are the integrators of the health-care system because we go to a medical center and we generate a medical record. And once that data is collected, if we would like to reuse it, we have to request it and physically withdraw it. Thanks to new technologies, integration with the health-care system will become data driven. Instead of labs, hospitals, and doctors' offices collecting and storing data, it will be the patient who directly collects a huge amount of data and information and has it available for personal use and for analysis and mass screening. Patients will always have immediate access to their own medical records, as well as those of the health-care professional or to the health-care facilities they frequent. These records will constantly be updated to reflect a person's most current vital signs. Perhaps medical data will be made available to the scientific community for large-scale processing of predictive patterns of this or that pathology.

Technological innovation is making data analysis and its interpretation increasingly faster. One important benefit of this is greater attention to the direct relationship between the health-care professional and the patient. Big data is already everywhere, and it can be analyzed and studied for health-related issues—sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, in Switzerland, a digital epidemiologist geolocated tweets on health-related issues. In just two weeks of analysis, he was able to draw a geographical map that indicated the frequency and distribution of the messages, managing to draw useful information on the propagation of a given infection. It is a very simple use of big data from Twitter, yet it has resulted in a surprising tool, as well as one that has been extremely useful for the health-care professional. If we raise the level of analysis complexity, then it becomes clear that the impact could be more meaningful. The elaboration of these and other data could give rise to many other fundamental aspects related to the health of each one of us.