Latest Blog Post

Now, more than ever, it’s essential to be on top of what’s coming next and how things will look in five or ten years’ time.

Preparing yourself for the future, for the skills you will require, for the techniques you will have wanted to master is one of the burning questions in personal development.

In May of this year I was lucky enough to attend a lecture at the Digital Symposium in London by The Medical Futurist.  

It has to be said that I wasn’t looking forward to this lecture, but it was the keynote introduction to the conference so I decided to sit through it. I was more than pleasantly surprised with the insight and ideas I left the lecture hall with.

Bertalan is a Doctor twice over (he has a Medical Degree and a PhD) and he spends his time studying disruptive technologies in healthcare.

His main concept though is patient directed healthcare and he sees this as being the future of healthcare across the world. Following his arguments, I am inclined to agree.

He has already had his entire DNA genome mapped so he knew he was one of the small percent of the population at risk of complications from statins and so had informed his GP that he was never to have statins and that was to go on his notes. He went one step further and had the commensal bacteria in his gut DNA mapped and was able to chart which foods were ideal for his gut and which weren’t, therefore being able to direct his healthcare on a day to day nutritional basis.

Bertalan will argue that this is the future of healthcare and I think he is probably right. We’re not a million miles away from giving our membership patients inexpensive intraoral cameras that click into your iPhone to allow them to take photographs of them or their children’s mouths at home to check if they need to be seen.

Patients are already able to manage their own appointment schedule and take different levels of healthcare dependent upon their needs.

Our world is splitting into groups of people who either choose to look after their health or don’t.

The group who buy the supplements, join the gyms, have their DNA checked and a list of healthcare professionals they see on a regular basis to help them stay healthy and live longer.

The rich get richer and the healthier get healthier and it’s hard to see how we will reverse this trend, certainly on an individual basis.

The opportunities that exist in patient directed healthcare in the coming years and decades will be utterly enormous but the problem is that it will not be something you can apply to society as a whole because they will have to be purchased.

It’s a terrible dilemma for the healthcare professional who wants to continue to treat everyone ‘free at the point of delivery’ but also wants to give the best quality healthcare to people who are interested in looking after themselves.

Blog Post Number: 1730