A New Era of Personalized Medicine: The Power of Analytics and AI

November 6, 2019

Article Summary


Healthcare is looking towards an era of personalized medicine in which providers customize treatments for the individual patient. Realizing this tailored level of care s a new level of data volume and analytics and AI capabilities that, while novel to healthcare, other industries are thriving in. Choosing the right role models as healthcare works towards the analytics- and AI-driven territory of personalized medicine will guide informed strategies and establish best practices.

With experience and expertise in these key areas, the military, aerospace, and automotive industries can serve as healthcare’s best examples:

1. The human cognitive processes of complex decision making.
2. The digitization of their industries, with the “health” of their assets as key drivers.
3. Operating in a “big data” ecosystem.

Medical professional with a stethoscope draped around neck / medical and global icons superimposed

With a new era of personalized medicine (also known as precision medicine) on the horizon and the increasing urgency for more analytics and AI capabilities, healthcare needs the right role models. According to Dale Sanders, Health Catalyst CTO, healthcare can emulate the military, aerospace, and automotive industries, as they’ve established inroads around the human cognitive processes of complex decision making and the digitization of their industries, with the “health” of their assets as key drivers.

Sanders—who worked in space, defense, and national intelligence before coming to healthcare—notes critical parallels between the military and healthcare. Both industries, he says, rely on subjective information from human sources and objective data from sensors, must navigate false positives and false negatives, and deal in life- and time-critical decision making.

From aerospace and automotive role models, healthcare can learn successful paths to digitization. Both industries have digitized their operations for managing and optimizing assets (e.g., air traffic control, baggage handling, ticketing, maintenance, and manufacturing), as healthcare must digitize registration, scheduling, encounters, diagnosis, orders, billing, and claims.

In the AI-driven era of personalized medicine, healthcare will also need to grow its data volume to understand patients in the comprehensive way that the military, aerospace, and automotive industries know their operations. The current digital understanding of U.S. patients is poor, with data collected about three times per year, during clinic and hospital visits, and almost no data existing on healthy patients. As healthcare builds towards big data, it can learn from these industries already operating on this greater scale.

Sanders shared his vision for the era of personalized medicine at the Asia-Pacific MedTech Forum 2019. For more in-depth insight into the analytics- and AI-powered future of healthcare, view the full slide deck for his presentation here.

Additional Reading

Would you like to learn more about this topic? Here are some articles we suggest:

  1. Precision Medicine: Four Trends Make It Possible
  2. Survey: Most Healthcare Organizations Unprepared for Precision Medicine

PowerPoint Slides

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