Future thinking

Robyn Whittaker, the clinical director of innovation at the Institute for Innovation and Improvement at Waitemata District Health Board and honorary Associate Professor at the National Institute for Health Innovation shares her stance on the future of healthcare.

“The idea with moving in to a more digital health system supported by technologies like AI is that we will be able to potentially collate far greater information about individuals that may be able to be used to help support more personally tailored health care.

This is not just the increased electronic health information that we are now starting to get with the digitisation of our health system (for example, Waitemata District Health Board now has electronic prescribing and administration of medicines, and electronic collection of vital signs and nursing observations) and new data that we are only just beginning to understand such as genomic data.

However, it is also a broad range of other information that may be collected via wearables (such as wristbands and smartwatches), environmental and other sensors (in the home and in the community), and also via the smartphone itself. There is already a multitude of data that can be collected during the routine use of mobile phones that can provide information on the person’s movements, mood, stressors, connections, conversations, activity levels, location, and more.

The broader the information on the individual, particularly those with chronic conditions, the more personalised and tailored health care and wellbeing support that could be provided.

However, there is still much work to be done to develop such a system. At this point, we don’t really know how to collate all this information in way that would make it truly usable and useful, and at the same time secure and accessible appropriately.

We don’t necessarily know what to do with 24/7 data on parameters that have previously only been measured episodically. We may not yet know how to take all that data and turn it into information that can easily be used and acted upon to help individuals to live healthier lives.”