This Blog shows the future of Surgical Products in hospital industry and healthcare industry. Our company SHRI SAI PHARMA in mumbai, maharashtra, india is innovative, upgraded and provide good services with latest technology as innovations to look out for in 2025. 3D printing is ushering in a new era of medical innovation. Its applications range from creating custom prosthetics to developing complex organ models for surgical planning. By 2025, expect to see even more revolutionary uses of 3D printing in healthcare.
The healthcare industry has to change. With a lack of staffing, increased costs, and a growing demand for high-quality care, it’s become clear that hospitals up and down the US are struggling to cope. Change, however, is not going to be a sudden, all-rounded thing. Realistically, it will take multiple innovations across specific healthcare sectors to ultimately improve the efficiency and success of the industry.
Thankfully, these kinds of small but crucial changes are already happening. In 2021, for instance, the retractor by Medical won The Queen’s Award for Innovation. This is a self-retaining surgical retractor that not only improves access to a surgical site, but frees up the hands of an assistant and results in fewer staff in the operating room. This subsequently has a positive effect on the staffing problem and reduces the risk of infection by replacing the number of individuals close to the open wound.
An Indicator of the Future:
This is just one innovation that has made an impact on the surgical products in mumbai landscape, but it’s the innovation that gives us the most clear indication of what surgical instrumentation will look like in the future – and how the healthcare industry with medical equipments, surgical products,healthcare products, surgical instruments in mumbai, maharashtra, india will be impacted as a whole.
In order to help with the low staffing and increased costs, more innovators are leaning towards ‘hands-free’ surgical instruments in mumbai at SHRI SAI PHARMA, essentially eliminating the amount of surgeons needed in the operating room. These hands-free tools are designed not only to maintain high standards of precision, but to enhance safety by reducing the potential for human error.
You can’t say that self-retaining retractors ‘automate’ the surgical process, but they do perform a job that – in the past – assistants would have to perform. As technology advances, we will likely see more instances where human processes are replaced by technological innovations. The integration of robotics and AI, for instance, has already begun. These technologies are able to assist surgeons in a variety of tasks, further reducing human error and alleviating the burden on understaffed surgical teams.
The rise of 3D printing technology is similarly allowing for the creation of personalised surgical instruments, tailored to the specific anatomy of each patient. This customisation can lead to more effective, faster procedures, which gives surgeons more time to operate on patients, and essentially improve the flow of patients in overcrowded, understaffed hospitals across the country.
The Future of Surgical Instrumentation:
With sustainable tools, telemedicine, and training simulations also developing in the healthcare industry, it’s clear that the future of surgical instrumentation is bright – and as mentioned earlier, this will ultimately improve the healthcare landscape as a whole. Human surgeons will always be required, of course we shri sai pharma are there to supply medical equipments, surgical instruments, hospital equipments,surgical products, healthcare products and laboratory products under one roof in mumbai, maharashtra, india and globally.
It’s unlikely that an entirely automated surgical process is on the horizon. But through the innovations we’re seeing now, the role of the surgeon will ultimately evolve, with enhanced operating times and an increased focus on the most critical and complex elements of surgery. This will only have positive implications, so while the healthcare system is struggling now, it’s not hard to see how it will develop and improve over the coming decades.
Medical Technology Trends to Watch in 2025:
Staying ahead of technological advances is vital for professionals dedicated to providing top-notch care. As 2025 approaches, it’s evident that groundbreaking medical innovations will transform the delivery and experience of medical services.
1. Integration of AI in Healthcare:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a linchpin in modern healthcare. By 2025, we anticipate AI’s role will be more pronounced, especially in diagnostics and patient care. The ability to process vast amounts of data quickly allows AI to assist doctors in diagnosing diseases more accurately and faster than traditional methods. For instance, AI algorithms can analyze imaging data to detect cancers at early stages, significantly improving patient outcomes.
AI also streamlines administrative tasks. It can manage patient records, schedule appointments, and handle billing, freeing healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care. Implementing AI reduces human error and enhances workflow efficiency, which physicians can leverage to improve patient management strategies.
Another exciting application of AI is its potential to personalize patient care. By analyzing individual health data, AI can tailor treatment plans to each patient’s unique needs, ensuring they receive the most effective care possible. This level of customization represents a significant leap forward in patient-centered care.
2. Hyper-Personalized Medicine:
The concept of hyper-personalized medicine is revolutionary. It involves tailoring medical treatments to patients based on their genetic makeup, lifestyle, and environment. This approach contrasts with the one-size-fits-all model, offering more precise and effective treatments. Genetic testing, for instance, enables doctors to understand how patients metabolize medications, allowing for personalized prescriptions that minimize side effects and maximize efficacy.
Technological advancements, such as CRISPR, are at the forefront of this trend. They provide tools to edit genes directly and remove mutations responsible for genetic disorders. By 2025, we expect to see more widespread use of these technologies in clinical settings, providing solutions to previously untreatable conditions.
Additionally, wearable devices and mobile apps collect real-time health data, allowing for ongoing monitoring of patients’ health. This information is vital for making informed decisions about treatment plans, ultimately improving patient outcomes. Healthcare professionals can harness these insights to deliver more proactive and preventative care.
3. Data-Driven Healthcare Transformation:
In today’s digital age, data is king. The healthcare industry generates vast amounts of data daily, and the challenge lies in utilizing it effectively. By 2025, data-driven healthcare will become more refined, with robust systems in place to manage and leverage information for decision-making.
Data analytics can significantly improve hospital operations, from resource allocation to patient flow management. By analyzing historical data, hospitals can predict patient admission rates, optimize staffing levels, and reduce wait times, enhancing the overall patient experience. This strategic use of data helps healthcare professionals improve efficiency and service delivery.
Furthermore, data analytics facilitates predictive healthcare. By recognizing patterns in patient data, professionals can identify potential health issues before they become severe, enabling early interventions and improving patient outcomes. This proactive approach represents a shift from reactive to preventative healthcare.
4. Blood Testing Reimagined:
Blood testing is a fundamental aspect of diagnostic medicine, but it’s often inconvenient and time-consuming. Innovations in blood testing technology promise to change that. By 2025, expect faster, more accurate tests requiring minimal blood samples, making the process less invasive for patients.
Microfluidic technologies, for instance, can perform multiple tests on a single drop of blood. This advancement speeds up diagnosis, allowing healthcare professionals to respond more swiftly to patient needs. It also reduces the discomfort for patients, particularly those requiring frequent testing.
Additionally, point-of-care testing devices are becoming more sophisticated, enabling tests to be conducted outside traditional lab settings. This mobility is especially beneficial in remote areas where access to healthcare facilities might be limited, ensuring that all patients receive timely diagnoses.
5. Virtual Healthcare Assistants:
Virtual healthcare assistants are transforming how patients interact with healthcare providers. These AI-driven platforms provide 24/7 patient support, answering queries, scheduling appointments, and reminding patients to take medications. By 2025, their capabilities will expand even further, encompassing more complex tasks.
These virtual assistants offer personalized health advice based on a patient’s history and symptoms, bridging the gap between visits. They empower patients with the information needed to manage their health proactively, which can be particularly beneficial for chronic disease management.
For healthcare professionals, virtual assistants streamline communications and reduce administrative burdens, allowing them to focus more on direct patient care. This shift enhances efficiency and improves the overall patient experience, making healthcare more accessible and responsive.
6. The Future of Telemedicine:
Telemedicine has surged in popularity, primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Its advantages of convenience and accessibility are undeniable, and by 2025, telemedicine will be a core component of healthcare delivery. Patients appreciate the convenience of virtual consultations, which eliminates travel time and expenses.
Telemedicine also expands access to specialized care, allowing patients in remote areas to consult with specialists without needing to travel long distances. This accessibility is crucial for ensuring equitable healthcare access across different regions. For healthcare professionals, telemedicine offers the flexibility to meet diverse patient needs more efficiently.
The integration of telehealth platforms into routine care will improve healthcare delivery, enabling continuous patient monitoring and engagement. This development empowers healthcare professionals to maintain consistent contact with their patients, providing timely interventions and improving health outcomes.
7. Wearable Technology and IoT in Healthcare:
Wearable technology is revolutionizing patient monitoring. Devices like fitness trackers and smartwatches collect real-time data on various health metrics, including heart rate, sleep patterns, and activity levels. By 2025, these devices will become even more sophisticated, providing deeper insights into patient health.
The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a significant role in connecting these devices, allowing seamless data transfer between patients and healthcare providers. This connectivity enables continuous monitoring and real-time alerts for any abnormalities, facilitating timely interventions when necessary.
For healthcare professionals, wearable technology offers valuable data for making informed decisions about patient care. The ability to track health trends over time allows for better management of chronic conditions and more personalized treatment plans, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
8. 3D Printing:
3D printing is ushering in a new era of medical innovation. Its applications range from creating custom prosthetics to developing complex organ models for surgical planning. By 2025, expect to see even more revolutionary uses of 3D printing in healthcare.
One of the most promising applications is in the creation of patient-specific implants. By using 3D printing, healthcare professionals can produce implants tailored to a patient’s anatomy, enhancing compatibility and reducing recovery times. This precision is crucial for improving surgical outcomes and patient satisfaction.
Additionally, 3D-printed organ models allow surgeons to practice complex procedures before performing them on patients. This preparation enhances surgical precision, reduces risks, and improves patient safety. These advancements highlight the potential of 3D printing to transform medical practices fundamentally.
Explore AI in Healthcare as Career Opportunities:
The advancements in medical technology forecasted for 2025 are set to redefine the healthcare landscape. From AI integration to the development of hyper-personalized medicine, these trends offer immense potential for improving patient outcomes and streamlining healthcare delivery. By staying informed and adapting to these changes, healthcare professionals can ensure they remain at the forefront of innovation, delivering the best possible care to their patients.
Whether you’re seeking permanent roles to establish a long-term career path or locum tenens positions for more flexibility, we offer a diverse array of options tailored to your physician career aspirations. Our dedicated team of recruiters works closely with you to understand your needs and guide you through the process, making your career transition smooth and rewarding.
The Future of Medical Devices: 2025 A.D.
DOCTORS
Twenty years from now, healthcare as we know it will have changed—dramatically. The basic reasons for these changes are in the headlines every day. Indicative influences, such as demographics, government policies, and social needs, will force the healthcare industry, its providers, and our government to rethink how treatment is delivered and who pays for it.
In the future, we may no longer have the luxury of always saving people. Economics will prevail as the principal influence upon the standard and level of care provided. However, with prudent planning, perhaps this dire circumstance can be prevented. Medical device manufacturers have a key role to play in developing devices that can contribute to lowering healthcare costs, as well as providing more effective, faster, safer, and less-invasive treatments for a variety of diseases.
Are all of the technologies of tomorrow in the research labs today? Probably so. After all, 20 years ago the knowledge of today’s cutting-edge techniques were well known in the scientific communities. Research and application testing of such areas as genetics, stem cells, and tissue biology, as well as their implications, required significant resources, technological advances, and time to prove efficacy. Safety issues are still being verified clinically. Now, with the clinical applications and positive indications growing and advancing steadily, the art and science of these fields are likewise transitioning in the technology and engineering phases.
So it makes sense that tomorrow’s technologies are in the works today. Just as we saw shape-memory alloys, plastic materials, and advanced fabrication technologies go from laboratories to manufacturing facilities, genetic treatments, tissue engineering, and nanomachines will be at the core of many leading devices and implants of the future.
One area that we are already seeing advances in is materials development and selection. Materials and their associated processing technologies will play a significant role by reducing side effects of medical devices and enabling the wider use of combination devices. These products incorporate mechanical features and functions as well as biological, pharmaceutical, or active therapeutic material. Testing for near-term solutions and interaction of drugs, chemicals, and materials will enable more and varied application of these devices.
One way new materials can affect healthcare may be in the fight against nosocomial infections in hospitals. Nosocomial infection and the propagation of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria have contributed to a problem that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates costs American hospitals $11 billion a year in treatment, also in developing country like india.
Hospitals are quickly learning the utility of following standards of practice and procedures analogous to those that industry uses in manufacturing devices and drugs. And the application of new materials and coating technologies to indwelling catheters, surgical devices, and implants, as well as the building materials and the handheld items (from pens to clipboards) will help hospitals meet their goals of reducing infections and the associated costs.
Features of Future Medical Devices:
What will medical devices look like in 20 years? Presently medical devices and systems are used for care, diagnosis, and interventional treatment. In the future, pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug treatments will likely reduce the market for certain surgical devices. However they will increase use of the implantable and nanobased targeted drug-delivery devices.
As patents run out on critical drugs, their generic equivalents will reduce the cost of treating certain disease states. Likewise, says “…cost stratification will bring more and more generic devices into the market. The newer devices will tend to be wearable, implantable, and portable.”
Percutaneous vascular and endoscopic access devices, which enable minimally invasive procedures, will have to leap new hurdles in an era when noncritical intervention done outside the traditional hospital-based operating room is the preferred mode of treatment. In a cost-conscious world, regulatory allowances will be made for technologies that enable diagnostic procedures and treatments to be performed in a clinic or office ambulatory surgical centers setting.
As the biotechnology of tissue regeneration improves, replacement organs and tissue-engineering advances will provide radical new options for addressing the most serious disease conditions. Tissue engineers are on the verge of breakthroughs that will grow entire organs, including hearts, livers, and kidneys. This builds off of the significant strides made in developing artificial skin for burn patients and bone substitutes that help repair osteoporosis and fractures.
Fully implantable, self-contained artificial hearts will be able to extend the lives of patients whose heart disease is beyond repair. An artificial pancreas, combining skin-based sensors to measure blood-glucose levels, a handheld computer to analyze the information, and an implantable infusion pump that adjusts glucose levels as needed, will provide diabetics with a more accurate and less painful way to monitor and treat their conditions.
Not Just Minimally Invasive:
The trend toward minimally invasive medical techniques that we are seeing now will move toward a least-invasive approach. Certainly, the drive for endoluminal procedures (i.e., oral access via the esophagus through the stomach wall into the peritoneal cavity) will enable surgeons to perform abdominal and soon cardiothoracic surgeries with local anesthetic, instead of general.
Further advances in scale and materials will yield similar devices for vascular, cardiac, and neurological surgeries. Integrated laparoscopic and endoscopic procedures will play a transitional role as further advances are made and computer-assisted and image-guided procedures become more prevalent outside of the major teaching hospitals.
The host of sterilized instruments presently provided for surgeries will be gradually replaced by mechanisms of actuating “arms” and articulating cannulae with various detachable end-effectors for multipurpose applications. Everything from cutting through suction and irrigation through stapling will be accomplished by these “smart” instruments that can be handheld or attached to external fixation platforms. These systems will also be integrated for image-guided, remote, and robotic control of surgeries.
New Age of Imaging:
Imaging, like drug delivery, is taking on two modalities—systemic and local. The systemic methods include whole-body computer-aided tomography (CAT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and integrated positron emission tomography (PET) scans. The local imaging is provided by ultrasonic, microoptics, optical coherent tomography (OCT), and other light- or energy-based imaging systems, which use catheters and probes to provide discrete images of tissue and structures.
Certainly, in the future we can imagine micro x-ray and microwave-active and feedback devices. We can also imagine combined or integrated devices, where multiple imaging modalities are incorporated on single catheters, so that diagnoses and treatment can be immediately implemented by the surgeon or specialist.
Combined devices will incorporate not just imaging modalities, but biological, pharmacological, and possibly radioactive ingredients as well. A current-day example is drug-eluting stents. Many other combined devices are on the drawing boards of companies right now. Infusion ports and implants, pacemakers, and future implantable monitoring devices will not only exclusively deliver a chemical or electrical therapeutic treatment, but also monitor and regulate that treatment regimen. They will also be able to communicate that information to external, wearable telemetry systems, which will, where applicable, feed information to clinical databases via mobile cellular telecommunication devices.
With the addition of biologic and genetic microlabs, implants—both passive and active—will be able to monitor physiological conditions, disease states, and enzyme production, while providing potential active functions. Neurological implants may provide key interface mechanisms for those suffering from blindness, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and even amputations where interactive function may be restored by prosthetics that interface with such devices.
Molecular and gene-based diagnostics will detect diseases earlier in their progressions, improving patient outcomes and lowering treatment costs. This will allow physicians to target specific drugs to match the patient’s genetic makeup. Molecular imaging diagnostic tests will be able to detect cancers and other disease conditions at the molecular level before they have spread and caused major damage.
Combinations of current diagnostic technologies such as ultrasound, MRI, and PET, will provide physicians with a more precise picture of how a disease progresses and how it responds to various treatments.
Technologies to Watch:
Miniaturization of medical devices will allow for more-targeted delivery of therapies. Their smaller size will enable more minimally invasive and noninvasive procedures, which could move care from hospitals to the outpatient setting. Miniaturization will also benefit younger patients because technologies, such as pacemakers, implantable cardioverter- defibrillators, and brain-stimulation devices, can be placed in younger patients who can’t use today’s adult-sized models. And moving even smaller, nanotechnology breakthroughs will create microscopic devices to deliver treatment to individual cells.
Information technology innovations will allow critical medical data, including images of the operating field, to be processed and transmitted rapidly over great distances, saving both patients and physicians time and speeding delivery of treatment. Information from devices such as pacemakers and blood-glucose test kits will be monitored over the Internet or via wireless connections. Specimen-based tests currently performed at a laboratory or a doctor’s office will be performed using home-based versions and the results immediately transmitted to a physician. Physicians will transmit commands remotely to activate or adjust a patient’s implanted device, for example an implantable defibrillator or brain-stimulation device.
Certain existing treatments, such as acupuncture, homeopathic, and other alternative-care therapies, are poised for growth in the new market. Generic medical devices will play a role here as the cost of manufacturing production will always be driven by the need for increased efficiency.
Conclusion:
How will the medical technology industry do its part to fulfill the future needs of healthcare? For those of us who design and develop medical devices, our mission must be to overcome the challenges of cost versus innovation. Our focus must be to create products that reduce cost, while at the same time improve standards of care.
The surgical tools of the future will heavily rely on new technology and will be more customized and flexible according to a new report from U.K.-based technology consulting firm Cambridge Consultants. The report stems from a recent thought-leadership event hosted by the firm in which surgical leaders from around the globe were brought together to discuss what they think the surgical landscape will look like in the year 2030.
As the healthcare system increasingly becomes less task-based and more value-based, product innovation will need to change, according to the report’s authors. “In most cases, device innovation will primarily focus on those technologies that can add ‘value’: improve clinical benefit to patients while also reducing the overall cost of care by increasing the efficiency of the clinic,” they wrote. “In the majority of cases, this will lead to device manufacturers basing their development decisions on the value of the clinical benefit delivered by a device in the context of its impact on overall clinic operational benefit.”
According to the authors, a two-tier healthcare system will emerge that spurs device innovation. A “primary tier” will focus on treating life-threatening conditions, while a secondary tier will focus on patients who pay for their own non-life-threatening procedures.
“We are already seeing this shift to a customer-responsive two-tier system along with a deskilling of surgical specialties at hospitals around the world,” Simon Karger, associate director, surgical & interventional products at Cambridge Consultants, said in a statement. Karger points to the Cleveland Clinic as an example of a hospital that organizes its hospitals around patient needs instead of the “traditional division between medicine and surgery.”
According to the report’s authors, only technologies that offer “rounded value” to providers will stick. Energy systems, for instance, likely will replace blades, according to the authors, with “precise cutting with real-time coagulation.”
New technology developed by researchers at Purdue University seems to follow that trend of increasing efficiency; it enables surgeons to use hand gestures to issue commands to a computer that allows them to browse through and display medical images in real time.
What’s more, a study published last January concluded that surgical accuracy and hospital efficiency could be improved through the use of patient-matched technology, which requires engineers to create patient-specific surgical instruments.
Vision 2025 Forecasting the Future of Health Care
Making accurate long-term predictions about health care is far from easy. After all, advances such as robotics-aided surgery, 254-slice CT scanners, and stem-cell research weren’t routinely available to doctors as recently as the early 1990s; heck, they weren’t even using E-mail back then. Projecting 15 years from now is equally difficult, but we put four experts in different fields — surgery, administration, informatics, and cardiology — to the test, asking for thoughts on what the medical landscape might look like in 2025. The composite picture that emerges is undoubtedly exciting — but promises some tremendous challenges as well.
Surgical Precision:
With the impressive innovations that robotics has brought to surgery over the past several years, you’d think Dr. Neil Seymour would be impressed.
He is — up to a point.
“Actually, compared to what the level of telerobotics is outside of medicine, these systems don’t represent the highest level of sophistication,” Seymour said of advances such as daVinci, which lets surgeons use ‘hands’ and a viewer several feet away from a patient to control robotic instruments inside the body.
“The space program uses technology that’s far more advanced,” said Seymour, chief of General Surgery at Baystate Medical Center. “So it’s not difficult to envision a much more capable robotics system that offers a visualization and precision capacity that would be hard to believe today. We’ll almost certainly see a progression from the current generation of robotics to the next.”
At the same time, “minimally invasive surgery will become more expansive, encompassing areas of surgery that aren’t currently so,” Seymour said. “That’s been the trend over the past two decades, and there’s no reason to suspect that won’t continue to be the case. We’ll see a push toward a lesser degree of invasiveness in virtually any surgical intervention.”
Baystate already employs innovations like natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES), which allows doctors to perform operations using an endoscope passed through one of the body’s natural orifices, avoiding any external scarring at all.
Even that can be improved upon, he said. “But to get there, we’re talking about significant technical advances that we don’t have yet — new instrumentation, new ways to visualize operative problems.”
Seymour also sees a greater role for stem-cell research, from which he hopes scientists can one day grow organs for patients who need them, instead of relying on transplants.
“Work is being done around the country on exactly that goal,” he said. “They’re looking at being able to grow a patient’s own skin to be used for grafts in a severe burn situation where there’s little skin available on the patient’s body. Or the growth of cartilaginous structures to replace ears or noses, using stem cells to replace these vital structures.” If there’s a foundation of success in these areas, he suggested, it could lead to more complex applications of the technology.
These high-tech changes are already altering the way medical students are trained and the skill sets they’ll need to master in the coming years, Seymour said. But they’re also posing some exciting training opportunities.
Take patient simulators, for example, which are essentially lifelike, interactive mannequins on which students can hone their skills. Seymour sees a day not too far off when sims are programmed with a patient’s specific data.
“Before an operation, you can actually look at a 3D, realistic version of the patient, and you can simulate an operation before doing it,” he said.
And consider future advances in imaging. “I can imagine a time when a liver surgeon, preparing for a complex liver section, can look at a holographic image showing the position of a tumor relative to critical structures in the liver, and interact in the virtual environment.”
Likewise, Seymour sees greater precision in the use of marking substances that will help surgeons target tumors and other issues without harming any healthy tissue.
None of this will come without cost, of course (more on that issue later).
“The cost of medical care will have to be contained,” he said. “Considering what the costs are currently, this coming technology and sophisticated devices will be expensive additions. We need to find a way to fund the development of these potentially exciting technologies, and there’s really no getting around the problem of cost.”
Staying Connected to Care:
Really, who wants to go see the doctor?
It can be an inconvenient trip. But as Americans live longer, managing more chronic conditions than ever before, they’re going to have to stay connected to the providers of their medical care. Vincent McCorkle thinks many of them won’t have to leave their home to do so.
No, house calls aren’t back, said McCorkle, president and CEO of the Sisters of Providence Health System, which includes Mercy Medical Center. The idea is something a little more high-tech.
“Baby boomers are pretty sophisticated,” he said. “I can envision them having a chair in their house where they can sit and send their weight, pulse, and blood pressure to their doctor. If they have diabetes or some type of pulmonary disease and they’re gaining weight or retaining water, the doctor gets a readout every morning and can see, ‘oh, she’s up three pounds. Let’s change the diuretic.’”
That picture represents a near future where patients and doctors are more connected remotely than they are now, and roles begin to shift.
“Providers will be much more interconnected, with more communication between physician offices, hospitals, and nursing homes,” McCorkle explained. Meanwhile, he noted, hospitals may be used less-often for non-acute patients, with outpatient care expanding, and what will follow is what he called a “downshifting” in the level of expertise needed to treat various conditions.
“Services that are now delivered by primary-care doctors might be provided by nurse practitioners,” he said — all this in an effort to serve an ever-growing, and ever-aging, population.
This trend will be driven partly by predicted changes in the way doctors and other providers are paid.
“Now, payment is on a fee-for-service basis; doctors are incentivized to see patients as many times as possible and provide as much care as they can,” McCorkle said. In the near future, however, hospitals might receive a bundled payment that covers not only a patient’s hospitalization, but also certain post-acute care. “That’s really going to change behaviors and drive a lot more coordination between hospitals, nursing homes, and home care,” to name a few, he explained.
Overseeing a health system that encompasses several different types of care, McCorkle takes a wide view of health trends, but he has smaller, common-sense improvements on his mind as well. Take, for example, the problem of patients neglecting to take their medications.
“Some of them have so many, they can’t keep track,” he said. “But there are some emerging technologies, like smart pill bottles, where, every time you open the bottle, it sends a signal to a repository that can track what time it was opened and how frequently, things like that. We’re starting to address medication adherence outside the clinical setting, maybe on your BlackBerry. There are some interesting ideas out there.”
If that’s a relatively mundane use of technology, others are more ambitious. For instance, molecular medicine will see advances as well, he said. “We’ll be able to look at biomarkers in people at the molecular level. There will be more customized information about you, and we’ll be able to offer early, individualized treatment options for people. Technology will still be a good driver.”
Yet, there are other factors, outside of the health care system, that need to change if Western Mass. is to become truly healthy, McCorkle said. The region ranks first in Massachusetts for cocaine and heroin addiction, which strains the area’s behavioral-health infrastructure, led by Providence Behavioral Health Hospital. And then there’s the education gap.
“In Springfield and Holyoke, half the students graduate from high school,” he said. “That affects the health status of our community, because the less educated you are, the less healthy you tend to be.”
That’s a problem that local civic and educational leaders have been trying to tackle for many years. Surrounded by large-scale challenges of its own, health care can only make sure it’s there to provide a safety net. And maybe a chair.
Beyond Big Brother:
“George Orwell has been very influential on the American psyche,” Dr. Dirk Stanley told The Healthcare News. “Other countries have a national medical database, and people don’t have a problem with it; they see it as a benefit. But here in America, we’re very focused on privacy.”
Stanley, a hospitalist — and, informally, an information-technology expert — at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, was speaking of the skittishness that many people feel when they hear talk of creating a nationwide database of medical records that would, in theory, be easily accessible to doctors.
The benefits of such a system are obvious. For one thing, having a patient’s medical history on hand would significantly cut down on unnecessary tests and possibly dangerous contraindications from unknown medications in the body.
“Someone shows up in the emergency room, short of breath, and the doctor’s first question is, ‘what medications are you on?’” Stanley said. “My guess is that 30 to 50 of people don’t know. They’ll say, ‘something for my heart,’ or ‘something for diabetes,’ but they don’t know the names, the doses, the frequencies” — which is especially true for an older individual who has a caregiver assemble a daily cocktail of pills.
A doctor can call the pharmacy, but not every drugstore is open 24/7. That means guesswork or, more likely, extra, otherwise unnecessary tests that can be expensive and time-consuming — all because there’s no way to access a patient’s files.
“They don’t have access to the right information because we don’t have a nationalized health care record,” Stanley said. “Why not? Well, there are political reasons — some people object to the government collecting everyone’s health information.”
Privacy is another reason, he added, noting that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is so far-reaching that it can be cumbersome even to transfer health records from one hospital to another. But the main problem might be technological — that is, how to create a centralized database when the computer systems of different providers can’t talk to each other, and patient record numbers are completely different from facility to facility.
The answer, said Stanley, isn’t a national patient ID number, because that wouldn’t solve the issue of getting different computer systems to communicate. What he envisions — and what companies including Microsoft and Google have already started working on — is a ‘health portal’ concept, whereby patients would build an online record of their health history and, crucially, have control over who gets to see it. Accessing the file would be simple for any provider, since all it would take is an Internet connection.
“To solve this problem, we need to change the way we think about a patient’s medical records,” Stanley said. “We’ve had this paternalistic view that, even though you own your information, the medical record itself is owned by the hospital. It has to become a more patient-based record to address some of the privacy issues. The only way to sell this solution to the American public is to allow patient access to the record so that the patient can decide what he wants in the record and who has access to it.”
The cost savings — from eliminating unnecessary tests, avoiding diagnosis and treatment errors, and other efficiencies — could be massive, Stanley said, arguing that, under a centralized records database, every U.S. citizen could have health coverage at the cost we’re paying today to cover everyone minus the 50 million or so that are uninsured, which is also observed in india.
Computerized records have been shown to save money — which could then be reinvested in patient care. That possibility is enough to keep Stanley — who was originally a computer programmer, and became interested in medicine after working with hospital informatics — up at night, thinking of the possibilities.
“I’m one of the few doctors who understands this issue, who has doctor skills and the computer skills to fix it,” he said of a challenge that has become a passion for him.
“How am I going to save more lives? As a doctor, I might save a couple thousand. But if I can help fix the health care system in terms of informatics, I might help save a couple million lives. I can be a translator of sorts; I can take doctors’ ideas and translate them for the people building the software, and I can take IT-speak and make it accessible for doctors.”
Sure, Americans and Indians would have to be sold on the idea, and implentation would likely be a drawn-out process. But he sees the idea as “safe, sane, and secure,” once questions about computer security are addressed, and the courts work out how records are accessed if a patient is unconscious, among other issues.
“This is a national problem, but we can achieve our goals,” Stanley said. “The obstacles are not insurmountable. It’ll take a lot of work and a lot of pain to rein in this problem, but at the end the benefits will be clearly demonstrated.”
Heart of the Matter:
Heart surgery has come a long way just in the past decade, said Dr. Jeffrey Leppo, citing a fast-growing emphasis on minimally invasive, laparoscopic procedures and the emergence of robotic precision to aid doctors’ hands. But there is a limit to what the next 15 or 20 years will bring.
“It won’t be stuff you see on Star Trek, with McCoy passing his wand over the body. That would be much better,” said Leppo, the Cardiology chair at Berkshire Medical Center.
Still, he said, there will come a time when people will come to see opening patients’ chests as “barbaric,” though it will remain necessary in some cases. That’s partly because — as other doctors we spoke with mentioned — surgery is becoming less invasive all the time.
But there’s another possibility on the horizon that could, in many cases, eliminate the need for heart surgery at all.
“Some of the most exciting stuff is the emergence of gene therapy,” said Leppo. “There was a big flurry of studies a few years ago of injecting genes directly into the heart muscles, trying to get a genetic change and restructure the heart, and potentially reverse some of the damage. But the engineers were not able to deliver that. It was basically an unsuccessful project.”
However, “hopefully, by sometime around 2020, we’ll actually be able to do that, figure out how to insert genes into different tissues in the body,” he said; in the case of the heart, that might mean preventing cholesterol blockages and other serious conditions. “If we can change the genes, we can cure people, as opposed to doing what we do now, which is plumbing.
“It’s like saying, ‘I have hard water, so I’ll keep replacing bits of the pipe,’ when you’ve never changed the water system,” he continued. “What we have now might make us feel better for awhile, and it might slow the process down, but it does not prevent it. Surgery, stents, they don’t prevent new problems from developing. They don’t cure them.”
The impact of gene therapy would, in fact, reach far beyond cardiology. “The control of a lot of diseases — cystic fibrosis, diabetes, lots of things — may benefit from a gene marker,” Leppo said. “We could change or ameliorate the disease if we find the gene controlling it. And we’re getting closer as more genes are identified. It would be a real breakthrough.”
Stem cells are another potential gold mine for heart research, Leppo said. The heart can develop irreparable muscle damage from heart attacks or long-term disease, but scientists believe they might one day use stem cells to generate new tissue.
Meanwhile, “diagnostic technologies are growing rapidly, involving all imaging modalities — X-ray, CT, MRI, echocardiography,” meaning more accurate diagnoses, and earlier in the disease process.
In fact, Leppo doesn’t see much at all standing in the way of continued progress and innovation — except for one pesky problem. And it’s a massive one.
“The biggest challenge for all of us will be the cost of care,” he said. “It’s a much bigger problem than most people realize. The projection is that, in 20 years, Medicare will pay out in excess of total federal revenues. President Obama is right: if we keep ignoring this, it will destroy our entire economy.”
At the same time, he said, “there’s no other society in the world as developed as we are that doesn’t provide health care to its citizens universally, and I find that outrageous,” he said. With almost 20 of the $2 trillion that flows into health care each year in America and India eaten up by insurance overhead, he argued, the system is in need of change.
Bottom Line:
Leppo isn’t alone; Seymour sees the same game-changing issue in his own crystal ball.
“There’s a concept that we as Americans deserve the best, and opposition to the idea that cost should be any prohibition on the level of technology that can be brought to bear on a health problem,” he said.
“But we’re now having difficulty with our accustomed level of prosperity and just paying for the most basic medical care. There will be conversations about which services may be vulnerable in the future., It’s a very difficult exercise, and one we’re not accustomed to.”
In McCorkle’s view, the next 15 years or so will bring about “disruptive or transformative solutions — and there has to be a willingness on the part of health care organizations to transform and change.
“But there’s going to be some good news,” he added, “and there’s an incredible amount of opportunity and potential.”
1 Comment
i am interested