Among the key health technology lessons that 2016 has reinforced: biology is fiendishly complex; data ≠ insight; impacting health–whether making new drugs or meaningfully changing behavior–is hard; and palpable progress, experienced by patients, is starting to occur (and is tremendously exciting).
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Our ability to interrogate the genome with the goal of improving healthcare has been enhanced by advances in both DNA sequencing technologies (like next-generation sequencing) and data management technologies (like cloud computing), as Craig Venter explained to a congressional subcommittee in 2014 (summarized here).
(Disclosure/reminder: I’m the chief medical officer at DNAnexus, a health data management company.)
Similarly, the rise of wearable technology, like activity trackers and smartphone apps, inspired our hope in digital health, offering the possibility of expanding our view of wellness and disease beyond the four walls of a hospital and a harried 15 minutes with a provider.
The excitement around these emerging technologies intensified over the last several years, especially following the announcement in early 2015 of the Precision Medicine Initiative, a program which suggested that perhaps a glorious, much-anticipated, individualized, digital-enabled future had sneaked up on us and, in fact, was already here.
Fortunately, 2016 was characterized by an urgently needed recalibration, as the gap between technology’s promise and medicine’s progress became more readily apparent (as anticipated in this 2015 commentary, based on a MedicineX talk I presented at Stanford). Precision medicine is still largely aspirational, and the demonstrated utility of digital health remains, for the most part, a hope waiting to be fulfilled.But just as unrestrained optimism in technology’s imminent potential predictably led to extravagant expectations and inevitable disappointment, instinctive and insistent pessimism may obscure the truly impressive progress that’s now underway.
[Source:-Forbes]
