Winter 2015/2016 - The Innovation Highway Newsletter | Page 15

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HEALTHCARE

DECEMBER 2015 – JANUARY 2016

Exponential Medicine:
Healthcare is Broken, Here’s How to Fix it!
Healthcare today is reactive, retrospective,
bureaucratic, and expensive; it’s sick care, not healthcare.
Article by Peter Diamandis, Nov. 10, 2015, Singularity U.

o Companies like Enlitic are using AI and deep learning to
improve medical imaging diagnostics and tumor detection
and integrate medical data to provide better actionable
advice for patients and doctors alike.
o Johnson & Johnson is teaching IBM Watson to read and
understand scientific papers that detail clinical trial
outcomes. Even Apple is partnering with IBM Watson to
provide access to health data from mobile apps.
o One such Watson system contains 40 million documents,
ingests an average of 27,000 new documents per day, and
provides insights for thousands of users. After only one
year, Watson’s successful diagnosis rate for lung cancer is
90 percent, compared to 50 percent for human doctors.

First, the Bad News
o Doctors spend $210 billion per year on procedures that
aren’t based on patient need, but fear of liability.
o Americans spend, on average, $8,915 per person on
healthcare — more than any other country on the planet.
o Prescription drugs cost around 50% more in the US than in
other industrialized countries.
o At current rates, by 2025, nearly a quarter of US GDP will
be spent on healthcare.
o It takes on average 12 years and $359 million to take a new
drug from the lab to a patient.
o Only 5 in 5,000 of these new drugs make it to human
testing. From there, only 1 of those 5 is actually approved
for human use.

Sensors and Healthcare
Wearables, connected devices and quantified-self apps will allow
us to collect enormous amounts of useful health information.

And Now, the Good News
We are in the midst of a (medical) revolution driven by
exponential technology: artificial intelligence, sensors, robotics,
3D printing, big data, genomics and stem cells. Today's $3
trillion healthcare industry is in the deceptive phase of its march
towards dematerialization, demonetization and democratization.
What does that mean? Imagine a time within the next 10 years
when:

o Wearables like the Quanttus wristband and Vital Connect
can transmit your electrocardiogram data, vital signs,
posture and stress levels anywhere on the planet.
o Google is developing a full range of internal and external
sensors (i.e., Google’s smart contact lens) that can monitor
the wearer’s vitals ranging from blood sugar levels to blood
chemistries.
o The $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE is bringing the
Star Trek tricorder to life — not for a doctor or nurse, but
for you, the consumer.

o AI-enabled autonomous health scans provide the best
diagnostics equally to the poorest and wealthiest on Earth.
o Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning
allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart
disease and neurodegenerative disease and