If there’s one part of the economy ripe for technological assistance, it’s the healthcare sector – with rising patient numbers and not enough doctors to treat them. More than 6mn people were on the waiting list for preplanned NHS treatments in England in December 2021, equivalent to over a tenth of the population. Healthcare workers, meanwhile, are overworked and exhausted. A study by the British Medical Association last year found that over a fifth of doctors were considering leaving the NHS for another career.
The good news is that interacting technologies are nearing the point at which they can transform healthcare processes and outcomes. Cardiologist, geneticist and digital medicine researcher Dr Eric Topol in his review for the NHS ‘Preparing the healthcare workforce to deliver the digital future,’ published in 2019, said that the world is at a “unique juncture in the history of medicine, with the convergence of genomics, biosensors, the electronic patient record and smartphone apps, all superimposed on a digital infrastructure, with artificial intelligence (AI) to make sense of the overwhelming amount of data created”.
There are three key trends driving innovation. The first relates to scientists' understanding of molecular biology and genetics. The human genome was first sequenced in 2003, a process that took 13 years and cost $3bn (£2.3bn). Today, it can be done in under an hour for less than $800. Most diseases have a genetic component, from cancer to heart disease, and pioneering diagnostics and treatments are increasingly based on an improved ability to sequence (read out) and even edit DNA. The ease with which gene sequencing can now be performed is set to result in enormous volumes of data being collected for individual patients.