Opinion: Treating the healthcare system

The current challenge in healthcare is not federal versus state, or private versus public, but systemic versus fragmented.  Our healthcare sector is not a system at all – we have no visibility across it. 

Poor health and a poor health system cost Australian business $32 billion every year. 

Healthcare is one of the fastest rising areas of Government expense.  It already costs taxpayers approximately $100 billion per year, equivalent to 10% of GDP.  And health expenditure is growing faster than GDP.  Within 20 years, as the population ages and chronic disease levels increase, Treasury expects Australia’s healthcare bill to top $250 billion.  So the bill for health care will more than double, at a time when fewer people are paying taxes.

Australia’s most efficient sectors have become so by leveraging information technology.  At first this was simply automation, and it has evolved to continuing to drive efficiencies by making their systems smarter.  By ‘smarter’ I mean, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. 

While healthcare creates huge amounts of digital information, many of its components and subsystems are instrumented.   There has been plenty of technological innovation, but it has been applied to procedures and diagnostic tests.   Its elements are not connected.  In banking, we just assume we can transfer funds and make payments between institutions.  Healthcare still doesn’t have this basic functionality.

If you don’t know what’s going on in the system – how can you possibly make it better?  Fortunately the Government is starting to address this issue and Australia is making progress towards an eHealth system. 

eHealth is just the start.  We need to take the next step by injecting intelligence and analytics into the health network.  If we do this we can optimise for better improved outcomes.  Imagine a system that could figure out the factors that make getting better more likely, predict system failures ahead of time and reduce wastage by preventing duplication? And what if it could ensure that the learnings from one part of the system are available to another? That’s exactly what the mining, finance and energy sectors are doing through analytics. 

As soon as we have an electronic information network in healthcare, we’ll be able to apply analytics to look across many patients’ histories and unlock new insight into the treatment of a disease, which in turn could accelerate the discovery of new drugs and therapies. We’ll be able to track and report infectious diseases to predict high-risk populations, enabling early intervention.

In the future, Smarter Healthcare could help us apply the discoveries and genomics and proteomics leading to personalised medicine. 

IBM believes that one of the biggest future changes in healthcare will be the use of cognitive computing.  This is where computers can answer spoken questions by analysing massive volumes of information and finding the underlying evidence to formulate a solution.  IBM’s “Watson” computer recently beat the two US Jeopardy Grand Masters.  Today it is impossible for a human to remember and process all the medical information available to doctors. Computers like Watson, which has the ability to read through the equivalent of a million books in less than three seconds, and provide instantaneous answers to complex questions will be able to act as a doctor’s assistant.

We need to rethink how we manage for health and provide healthcare.  An important part of this is investment in electronic infrastructure.  If we want healthcare to be as productive as the other knowledge-intensive sectors in our economy, it must be enabled by systems that are instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.

Megan Kennedy is Healthcare Industry Lead, Software Solutions, at IBM Australia/New Zealand