After reviewing the article “How big data will save your life,” I noted how Dr. Robert Walker, director of health innovation for the U.S. Army Surgeon General, announced his frustration with being a data entry clerk in recent years than a physician. He led me to dig deeper into health innovation’s meaning and how we can transform it with big data. A comprehensive working definition of health innovation is as follows: Health innovation is to develop new or improved health policies, systems, products and technologies, and services and delivery methods that improve people’s health, with a particular focus on the needs of vulnerable populations. Health innovation isn’t limited to only product development. When breaking down the fundamentals of health innovation, there’s three. Approaches need to follow builds on the notion of ‘integrated innovation,’ which is the “coordinated application of (1) scientific/technological, (2) social and (3) business Innovation to develop solutions to complex challenges” According to Grand Challenges Canada. Strengthening health systems requires ever-evolving policies, which translates into improved development and delivery of health services and technologies. Needs-based innovation catalyzes this process. The Discovery, development, and delivery of health products and services are integral components of a holistic approach to health innovation. Business innovation is also critical for finding and scaling up financially sustainable solutions. It may involve initiatives to address various kinds of market failures and build new, synergistic partnerships employing open access policies. A lot of times, we’re turning our backs on patients by jamming data into the computer. In a healthcare setting, we have data but don’t know how to prioritize it then figure out the right tools to meet that need versus sort of these broad heuristics that are good sound bites. Rather than using big data to predict health outcomes, let’s try and influence the outcome. We should want to understand whether therapies are solving an actual patient need or not. Whether people are on the right treatments faster than we do today because what we do today is all driven off of things like claims. Data is all driven off super long delay, really messy data, not always accurate a.k.a outcome data. A finer point to understand what’s happening with that patient in real-world settings, not in sort of real-world clinical settings, would be excellent.
“Christine Lemke on Evidation’s Push to Use Wearables in Healthcare.” MoneyBall Medicine, 4 Jan. 2021, moneyball-medicine.simplecast.com/episodes/christine-lemke-on-evidations-push-to-use-wearables-in-healthcare-9babUn6v/transcript.
“Integrated Innovation.” Grand Challenges Canada, 25 June 2019, www.grandchallenges.ca/funding-opportunities/integrated-innovation.
Mearian, Lucas. “How Big Data Will Save Your Life.” Computerworld, 25 Apr. 2013, www.computerworld.com/article/2496345/how-big-data-will-save-your-life.html.
Staff, Time. “12 Innovations That Will Change Health Care and Medicine in the 2020s.” Time, 25 Oct. 2019, time.com/5710295/top-health-innovations.
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