Mind-Blowing Progress in Medical Services in 2017

Most of us complain about the medical services we have in our country.  In Canada, wait times for non-life-threatening healthcare at the clinic are horrendously long.  In the US, it's the inequality of services:  the rich (and properly insured) can afford quick, high quality, and timely medical services while the uninsured or those that cannot afford it barely get any health services at all.

Other countries vary in their take, policy and quality of services.

While I cannot predict exactly how policy will change in the near future, I can talk about how technology will perhaps make excellent medical services more affordable and higher quality all at the same time.

The video here speaks a little bit on the subject:

Lots of the costs behind hospitals is in the staff.  We can help with that through the use of robotics and artificial intelligence.  One to help the nurses do their jobs (changing patient's positions for example) and the other to monitor, diagnose and even operate better than surgeons could.

Don't believe it?  Well, this is not the future.  This is already rolling out and being developed.  In fact, huge amounts of funding are currently going into all sorts of artificial intelligence initiative's and medical applications are not ignored.

Many labs are developing ways to create organs on demand from the cells of a patient.  This one is a special kind of 3D printer that prints fully functional human skin.  Useful for burn victims or post-operation adjustments, or even cosmetic surgery.  Coming to a hospital or clinic near you.

There is plenty of labs working on very efficient ways to create new custom molecules or drugs that would allow us to create treatments or cures for all sorts of problems.  This lab uses origami to inspire drug design.  Of course, there is still the question whether a brand new artificial protein drug like this would be accepted by the body's immune system or cause allergies.

This brings up another point:  using AI (Artificial Intelligence) and smartphones, people can possibly diagnose problems faster and better than doctors, and that from the comfort of their own home.  For now we're seeing the emergence of applications for superficial issues like skin cancer, but early statistics from these show that these AI apps are just as efficient than your local dermatologist.  Talk about relieving the emergency rooms and clinics!

Now, I am hoping that healthcare institutions modernize even more, in order to take care of people, as people, instead of patients to catch and release as soon as possible.  If all of the above works out and we expand on the efforts, maybe we can spend more human time and care for the patients themselves, like what the Forward clinic is suggesting out in San Francisco.  It's a nice presentation.

If all today's hospitals were this way, I may spend some of my holidays there just to check out my bios and my innards... for fun!

If you are an opportunist and an entrepreneur in this space.... keep up the good work!  We may yet get halfway decent healthcare up and running within the next 10 years, and make it affordable to all citizens!