This article is part of the ‘Think Further’ series, sponsored by Fred Alger Management, Inc. For more ‘Think Further’ content and videos, visit thinkfurtheralger.com.
Throughout my career I have repeatedly seen that remote patient monitoring can lower costs and extend life better than prescription drugs. Which got me thinking: if this works for chronically ill patients, what are the possibilities for the general population?
We are living in an era of exploding popularity for consumer health and wellness devices and online services that help manage activity, food, sleep, stress, resilience, and more. These tools are creating an incredible amount of digital exhaust which, at the individual level, combines to create a detailed, real-time health fingerprint of each person, and at the aggregate level provides healthcare professionals with more information than ever before possible about what keeps people healthy (and what makes them sick).
Health care over the next 50 years will leverage the innovation in the consumer space and the massive amounts of personal health data it will create, and by 2064 I expect that these new technologies will allow us to move from a model of “sick care” to a much more preventative and predictive model of health care. Remote patient monitoring will become mainstream as the technology embedded in our arms, eyes, and brains will constantly track what’s happening in our bodies and feed us real-time information on optimizing our health—and keep us out of the doctor’s office.
–Derek Newell, CEO at Jiff, Inc.
