Jeroen Tas0:10
When we talk about health care, we really talk not just about sick care where people go to their general practitioner when they have an issue. I'm really talking about health in the wider context. What we see happening is basically a tremendous pressure on the system because half of the population in the Western world is either suffering from a chronic disease or at risk of a chronic disease. So what does this mean? It means that we need a different system that helps people to, number one, live more healthily, and as they develop a condition, have better tools to manage their own condition, but be able to access care as and when and where needed. I think we're at a very exciting time.
If my daughter were suffering from diabetes, every day you have to make about 150 decisions considering your health. You basically need to choose to help yourself, to understand yourself, and to better take care of yourself. But that will not be sufficient; you need clinical experts to support you. If you look at elderly people, you'll also see that they typically suffer from multiple chronic diseases. You see that the people who have the highest strain on the healthcare system are typically people with multiple chronic conditions that call emergency help multiple times a year. So what if we can help these people take better care of themselves? What if we have an early warning system that can give us an early warning to help these people and intervene before, for instance, cardiac arrest happens? So can we build systems that do early detection, systems that intervene at an earlier stage so that we can avoid deterioration or acute situations? We can aggregate that information and analyze the relationship between symptoms, diagnostics, treatment, and outcomes, and make sure that that feedback loop gets better and better and better. We do that by aggregating data. So where do we see this going? We see increased leverage of technology.
With that full profile of the patient, we can provide way better care because we see things coming earlier on. If there's an emergency situation, we can capture the right background of that patient: the history, the medication, the allergies. All of this will help improve care at the point of care. But more importantly, we will be able to aggregate that information and build that intelligence into the system of care that will help patients take better care of themselves, that will help care teams to intervene early where and when needed, and that will help clinicians to create a much better view of the patient and therefore provide a better diagnostic.
It can be linked to the way people live, work, and play, and where medicine becomes one of the enablers of health. That includes the way we behave, the motivations we have, and the social environment in which we live and work. So we believe we're at the beginning of a completely new era where we provide health to everybody, and where we empower people to take control of their own conditions, but always backed up by the knowledge and expertise of a care network. I think it's a very interesting future indeed.
