Where is healthcare heading?

On Health Day GMV has taken part in a debating panel looking at the medicine of the future. Carlos Royo, Strategy Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector, shared his opinions together with María Martín Díez de Baldeón, regional health minister of La Rioja; Luis María de Palacio, Secretary General of the Entrepreneurial Federation of Spanish Pharmacists (Federación Empresarial de Farmacéuticos Españoles: FEFE); Juan Abarca, President of HM Hospitales, Javier Urzay, subdirector general of FarmaIndustria and José Manuel Baltar, regional health minister of the Canary Islands.

In the words of GMV’s executive, “we are still in the prehistory of what is to come in healthcare”. In the not too distant future “Artificial Intelligence, wearables and Big Data are going to change the way of diagnosing illnesses, recruiting patients for clinical tests and running a hospital”. In the longer term “the future hospital will be the patient’s bed at home”. None of the hospital managers present objected to this claim, even going further along the same game-changing lines by forecasting a scene in which there will be “engineer-doctors and physicist-nurses”.

The panelists agreed that machines look set to play an increasingly important healthcare role, carrying out tasks now performed by doctors, who will in turn taken on more added-value roles. That said, “it will be we specialists, with a top technical training and perfect mastery of the technology, that will be responsible for winning patients’ trust and it will be this trust that underpins the relationship.” Royo added “It will always be the doctor who inputs the added value, the knowledge and trust”.

The current paternalist patient-doctor relationship will evolve towards another in which patients take on a more active role in their own healthcare. Other themes that came up for debate were the evolution from acute patient to chronic patient treated in his or her own home, using remote healthcare tools like antari, and the role of institutions in health promotion and prevention.