By Roy Smythe

With new medical miracles being lauded by health care providers on a regular basis, it’s hard to differentiate between realistic benefits and overblown hype.

Promising research does not always equate to applicable clinical use in the near future. When the potential clinical effectiveness of a research endeavor is exaggerated, it may stymie the flow of financial, medical and regulatory support. Hyped-up claims can be a death sentence to once-promising work.



If claims such as these do not pan out, those who invest in and fund medical research may be wary of supporting future ventures, and the hype ends in head-scratching as to why millions were invested in a no-show. More critically, hype can lead to heartbreaking situations for people waiting on the “next big thing” with the potential to save their lives, or the life of a loved one.

Medical advances cannot be made without research and trial and error, which often requires decades of work and significant investment to develop viable solutions. Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, predictive analytics and natural language processing have great potential to help us solve some of the biggest challenges we’ve faced in health care over the past 500 years. But there is huge risk when we talk up shiny new technology and move too quickly to the health care delivery market, while the solutions themselves don’t deliver on their promise. If clinicians, providers and investors are not seeing results they may retrench. Admittedly, however, it’s also a fine line we walk, because when we don’t move quickly enough – waiting longer than necessary to bring potentially beneficial products and solutions forward – more patients lose out.

Finding the middle ground
It’s difficult to achieve the proper balance between the two extremes of such a dynamic health care innovation spectrum. We saw this same scenario play out with all the buzz around gene therapy 20 years ago. On one hand, there will always be products or technologies that promise far beyond what they’ll ever be able to deliver, leaving patients and investors at a loss. On the other, we have companies that might not seem that miraculous, but deliver on improvements and, more importantly, actually work. The middle ground may be somewhere that both gathers the interest of patients and investors and provides modest, yet successful, results. As with many aspects of life and business, finding the middle ground, if one actually even exists, can be tricky.

AI, for instance, has much potential, but we need to be careful of the hype around it as it cannot do everything. AI will help us fix problems that have stumped the health care industry for centuries, but we need to be realistic regarding where we are now in order to most effectively meet that future goal. Yes, it can help with superior pattern recognition and processing capabilities and has the capacity to help solve problems we can’t imagine today, but it will never completely replace the need for the human provider of care, the nurse or physician. Companies need to be mindful of making claims like this, as AI will be much more focused on augmenting what care providers are already doing, scaling existing expertise to larger numbers of patients while improving efficiency and effectiveness of interventions.

Twenty years ago, the promise of gene therapy was dominated by hype, while all the time saddled with a number of very vexing problems that needed to be solved before the approach was clinically useful, but the field has made huge strides since that time and is now becoming clinically useful. In other fields such as human genomics, we’ve gone from knowing only a few useful things about disease predisposition to advancements like centralizing and organizing genomic data for increasing numbers of clinical applications, or using at-home genetic testing kits that can help provide a clearer picture of a person’s ancestry. However, we need to be careful here as well.

On the extreme end, we have the hype and controversy of eugenics and “designer babies,” but in the near term we will be using our growing understanding of the genetic basis of the predisposition of disease and disease treatment effectiveness to provide more accurate prognoses and more effective tailored therapies. Health care leaders should be excited about the future and be optimistic about what is to come, but have reasonable expectations – finding the middle ground once again between dreaming big and being realistic regarding what consumers and patients can expect.

Excessive hype from investigators or those populating the boardrooms of corporations and health care institutions can put life-saving treatments at risk, or certainly delay their development. In our technological age, researchers, investors and patients must remember “Moore’s Law” will not likely apply to the development of all new biomedical and technological solutions to treat human disease. There’s no guarantee that we will double our progress each year. Research and clinical trials will continue to take years of development to reach efficacy and even longer to be approved for widespread treatment. When hype overshadows reality, the greatest harm can fall on patients.

We don’t need to slow down the innovation engine by any means, just make sure that we are realistic about how soon the vehicle that uses that engine can take us to the next place in health care, and how long it will take us to get there.

About the author: Roy Smythe is the chief medical officer, Strategy & Partnerships, at Philips.