Health Care Should be a Team Sport
Intel’s Eric Dishman became a leading medical tech specialist known for his great TED talks. In this post, I’ll feature his current role as National Director of All of Us, where he promotes Precision Medicine. His idea that Health Care should be a Team Sport includes the patient, the provider, and the researcher. Let’s start with this short (0:43) video clip.
What is All of Us?
A program of the National Institutes of Health, All of Us is changing how health research is done, and you can be part of it. Dishman briefly describes the program in this video (3:22).
Health Care should be a team sport
In one of his early TED talks, Dishman shared his very personal story to suggest some bold ideas for reinventing healthcare. His idea was to put the patient at the center of a treatment team. During this next video (16:00), he tells the story of when he was in college and doctors told him he had just 2 to 3 years to live. That was a long time ago, and one rectified diagnosis and a transplant later, Dishman is still here, thankfully for all of us.
The Personal Health System
From the video above, Dishman described three pillars in his view of a personal health system:
- Care Anywhere, including at home as the default model;
- Care Networking, with smart medical teams replacing individual specialists working alone; and
- Care Customization, with genomics and technology leading to precision medicine.
Home Health Care
In this last, must-watch, TED talk (16:41), Dishman uses an old rotary phone to demonstrate the idea of sensors tracking behavioral markers and why this will become important to our aging population. While being critical of the mainframe mentality of traveling to expensive hospitals for care, he makes a bold argument: As our aging population booms, it’s imperative to move “away” from this mainframe thinking to create personal, networked, home-based health care for all. We need to fund a Going-to-the-Moon like project, with a national goal of moving at least half of health care from hospitals to homes. That’s consistent with my own view of healthcare tech, where sensors and medical devices keep getting cheaper, smaller, easier to use, and more accurate over time.
Editor’s Note
That last TED talk, from 2010, remains one of my favorites. It’s part of what prompted me to start Modern Health Talk to share my own perspectives. I hope you enjoyed it and will comment.
