From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
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.
