A new whitepaper by Tony Estrella imagines the future of personalized healthcare
During the current COVID-19 pandemic, experts around the world are rethinking health and healthcare. In an uncertain and ever-changing world, how can healthcare systems prepare themselves to deal with new, and often unexpected, challenges?
Tony Estrella, health expert, futurist, and author re-imagines the future of healthcare in a part of the world where the majority of the population resides – the Asia Pacific region (APAC). In a paper entitled A Vision for Asia Pacific in 2050, Tony envisions healthy longevity as the aim of healthcare providers thirty years from now.
Dynamic prevention, rather than a focus on sick care, is a central change that Tony outlines in our imagined future. He details multiple foci for future healthcare, including the development of proactive health systems, addressing issues of inequality and the establishment of interconnected ecosystems, driven by continued technological innovation.
Tony skillfully links real experiences and current trends throughout Asia Pacific to create this vision of the future. For example, he refers to an “ethical tipping point” in the government of Singapore’s actual response to the spread of COVID-19 within its migrant construction labor force in 2020. Tony described the Singaporean Prime Minister approach to ethical leadership when he referred to the hopeful return of laborers to their home countries by announcing on social media “We will take care of you the same way we take care of Singaporeans. They will come home to you” (once cured of COVID-19).
Accordingly, governments leading with a social conscience will be a hallmark of future healthcare, rather than an exception. This is a welcomed prediction, especially in consideration of the widespread impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
Tony details five axioms driven by governments, society as a whole, and health organizations formed through interconnected systems, individuals and clinicians. Governments will create policies and governance in favor of precision medicine, and society will develop a new social conscience driving the establishment of universal access to longevity health. By 2050, technology will power interconnected systems collecting and managing data and individuals will have accumulated all personal, behavior and health information into their own “humanome”, repositories that will enable clinicians to personalize prevention and care interventions.
Tony’s vision, fast-forwarding us 30 years from now, is a great starting point for debate and discussion about a future world where digital health and data-centered systems have become the new healthcare, and all the barriers we are facing today seem to have been overcome.
That specific vision of Asia Pacific is very interesting and insightful, especially looking at the current situation we are living in where many of the Asian countries seem to have managed to control the pandemic faster and better than their western counterparts. Will APAC lead the way in reinventing tomorrow’s healthcare?
The paper is available free of charge and can be downloaded here.
Tony’s work is part of a larger initiative, FutureProofing Healthcare, which began in 2018 as a way to benchmark various European countries’ healthcare systems, both in the present and in an uncertain future. Tony analyzes the APAC region, a vast territory comprising 60% of the world’s population. Spread over 44 countries, APAC is organized in six geographic clusters, from the Indian subcontinent to Japan to Australia and New Zealand.
To find more data on European benchmarks, visit the FutureProofing Healthcare website.
