Getting Away From “Sickcare” – We Need New Models For Prevention!

How many medical screenings have you gotten in the past five years?

And how hard were they to get?

Even though we’ve made a lot of progress in getting more preventative screenings in place throughout the last generation, a lot of them still involve general anesthesia, or a lot of radiology – or other challenges.

That leads to a sort of equivocation about the risks and benefits of screening…

There’s a consensus that you don’t screen for something unless you have a significant risk factor, such as age, or heredity.

Would that still be the case if screening was easier to do?

Doesn’t it make sense that we would expand screening to see if we are at risk for some type of disease or not?

There are various arguments about this out there in the medical community, and elsewhere. Some people say that we ‘don’t want to know,’ because we’ll worry about things that may not develop after all. But there’s also the cost issue – and making screening more affordable tends to save lives. You can look at reports like this one from the CDC on colorectal cancer screenings, but most of us don’t have to, because we feel, intuitively, that having advanced warning about disease will help us to make interventions, and that, common-sense wise, this could save lives, including our own.

Shout out to Dan Elton who, in his TEDxBoston talk, brings up some good points about this sort of analysis, and how AI may be able to help!

We know, intuitively, that doctors only have so much bandwidth – it’s evident when you realize that a lot of family doctors don’t even have time to take a morning walk, or eat lunch, and specialists don’t have infinite hours in their days, either.

As for radiology review, Elton and others at the event (for example, Dr. Ami Bhatt covered some relevant insights) showed us the doctors might miss things because they’re stretched to the max – but that AI, properly harnessed, can alleviate a lot of this burden.

AI can help in ordering and presenting information so that a lot of the repetitive work has already been handled. It can also get deep insights that would be hard for humans to get to on their own.

Of course, all of this assumes regulatory approval, and we can see that the FDA has certain criteria for screening.

But with the right approach we’ll get more preventative coverage for populations and much better health outcomes across the board!

After all, we’re over a decade past the HITECH Act, and many things in the EMR/EHR still aren’t getting used. Doesn’t that seem a little backward?

What if all of that data was in play all the time?

We would know a lot more about our health. Think about the potential for AI to bring us into a new age of more powerful preventative care and out of the age of “sickcare”.