Healthcare & the Future of Data⚕️
When I turn my wrist to look at my Apple Watch, my eyes focus on health.
What was initially positioned as an iPhone accessory, even a luxury fashion item, has become a device for monitoring our heart rates, blood oxygen levels, and exercise activity.
The forthcoming Apple Watches will be doubling down on health, providing even deeper information about the user’s wellness in real-time. Enhanced notifications to emergency services such connecting fall detection directly with the users’ precise location. For example, an Apple Watch wearer who becomes injured while hiking in a remote forest would have their location immediately sent to emergency services even when no cell phone towers are nearby thanks to improved satellite-based geo-tagging.
The evolution of our connected devices can provide insights such as whether the user is pre-diabetic or if they are experiencing muscular challenges. It’s truly miraculous and almost definitely will save lives.
But despite improvements to the health care functions of smart devices, there remain hurdles to data sharing in the form of systems that don’t easily speak to each other as well as lingering consumer fears about privacy.
A Data Sharing Breakthrough
Advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to lower many of those technical obstacles. But the biggest breakthrough to the data sharing necessary to expand healthtech came in a potentially groundbreaking agreement back in July.
In case you missed it: the European Union and U.S. established a new Data Privacy Framework, which allows seamless data transfer between those two sides.
To ensure consumer confidence that their data will be safeguarded, a Data Protection Review Court allows users to file privacy complaints and orders data deletion if there’s a breach. Privacy activists are still threatening legal action, however. They claim that the EU protections remain inadequate. At the same time, U.S. data protection measures may need enhancement to guarantee equivalence with EU standards. But at least for now, this is an important step forward.
The concept of the internet was born as a military program designed to enable seamless sharing of communications and data. The advance of machine learning and artificial intelligence is predicated on rapidly automating analytics beyond human capabilities to derive insights with instantaneous speed.
Lately, those abilities have brought more fears than hopes among consumers, regulators, and even some technology leaders.
But I remain hopeful that the positive use of emerging tech like biometrics powered by artificial intelligence contains the solutions to worries about identity theft and manipulation.
Specifically, I see the Healthtech sector as an area that will showcase the beneficial aspects of AI.
In health care, data sharing could prove to be a game-changer. The current trend among tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon to delve deeper into health care has raised questions about data accessibility.
Previously, GDPR regulations hindered the sharing of health data. However, a potential deal between the U.S. and Europe might change the landscape. By allowing the exchange of anonymized health data from various regions, AI-driven health tech applications could become more powerful and accurate in diagnosing medical conditions.
The implications of data sharing can strengthen global and local intelligence throughout the healthcare system. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the challenges of data sharing. With fragmented systems, countries, on down to cities, struggled to track and predict the spread of the virus effectively. By embracing data sharing, governments and health organizations could improve early detection and preparedness for future global health crises.
Tech Downsides Turn Into Upsides
For example, reports on wastewater have served as a signal of a COVID-19 spike. But getting that information out more quickly and widely has been lacking. The use of AI layers can change that.
Despite the promise of data sharing, as I noted above, there will always be sensitivities to consider. Privacy concerns will always remain perennial. In addition to regulatory clarity, the solution to those data safety is proving the widest possible utility for health care information access and sharing. The potential benefits outweigh the risks. By encouraging cross-border data sharing, industries like healthtech could leap forward in revolutionizing disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.
Technological advances always come with downsides. But by exploring the upsides and making sure the values are clearly felt as universally as possible, the problems of managing consumers’ most sensitive, personal information can ultimately pave the way for a new era of health and wellness for consumers as well as the startups and investors opening up this crucial sector more fully.