{"id":77498,"date":"2016-11-27T06:30:15","date_gmt":"2016-11-27T05:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/e52.nl\/?p=77498"},"modified":"2016-11-27T06:30:15","modified_gmt":"2016-11-27T05:30:15","slug":"tomorrow-is-good-lucien-engelen-climate-change-deniers-in-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/en\/tomorrow-is-good-lucien-engelen-climate-change-deniers-in-health-care\/","title":{"rendered":"[TOMORROW IS GOOD] Lucien Engelen: Climate Change Deniers in Health Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow is good.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>In a weekly column, alternately written by Lucien Engelen, Maarten Steinbuch, Carlo van de Weijer and Daan Kersten, E52 tries to find out what the future will look like. All four contributors<\/a> are \u2013 in addition to their \u2018normal\u2019 groundbreaking work \u2013 linked to theSingularityU The\u00a0Netherlands<\/a>, the organization that focuses on spreading knowledge about technologies that can provide solutions to the problems of our time. This Sunday, it\u2019s Lucien Engelen\u2018s turn.<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

By\u00a0Lucien Engelen<\/strong>
\n\"SU<\/a>Over the course of the past months we\u2019ve seen the establishment being genuinely surprised at the outcomes of polls, referenda and elections. Much of what – mainly afterwards – in the media is being analyzed as easily predictable, if only one had listened to what has been said.<\/p>\n

Neglect is the word that comes to mind. Neglect on climate change. Although climate scientists are virtually unanimous in saying global warming is true, there are a number of ways groups are trying to undermine real scientific evidence. (In 2013\u20132014 only 4 of 69,406 authors rejected Anthropogenic Global Warming<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Neglect about BREXIT of many in the UK who for years argued the added value of the European Union, and neglect about the impact of \u201cLeave\u201d forces mobilizing Euro-sceptic forces via social media and campaigning.<\/p>\n

Neglect of the obvious undercurrent in the US of people with clearly a different mindset and values than the establishment at the coasts and in the big cities.<\/p>\n

The same easily could happen to healthcare and medicine as I sense a lot of \u2018looking-the-other-way\u2019 \u2013 failing to notice the unprecedented and perhaps unimaginable changes that are in fact happening. If nothing changes we could end up like in the movie The Day After Tomorrow,\u201d where overnight the climate changed completely \u2026 just as America woke up November 9th to find itself in a completely upside down reality.<\/p>\n

All of these cases illustrate the impact of looking away without realizing what\u2019s happening, and thus not doing anything about the root cause. And it is here where I see resemblance with what is happening in health(care) nowadays on the debate of digital health.<\/p>\n

Although we live in a hyper-connected world, health(care) & medicine is not noticing or not responding to the expectations of users (patients, family and informal care in my definition) on how they want health(care) delivered to them. A Dutch longitudinal e-healthstudy<\/a> for the 4th year showed the gap in perception. 75% of patients asked stated they really wanted to use digital health whenever they can, but almost never have been offered options by their doctor or nurse. Healthcare professionals on the other hand stated \u201cpatients haven\u2019t been asking us for digital health, so they don\u2019t want it, or are not ready for it, yet\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s an interesting divide to take a deeper look into. The terms e-health<\/a>, m-health<\/a> and Health 2.0<\/a> to me are part of the same development towards delivering health(care) in a digital format, thus digital health<\/strong><\/a>. Whereas we are trying to de-silo health(care) in everyday practices, a new divide looms when we tend to handle all those as different developments and as something new (including the finance and reimbursement of it).<\/p>\n

To me digital health is just another form factor of delivering care, and probably is here to stay as routine health(care) and should be treated as such. Just as insurance companies don\u2019t procure electricity for hospitals from power grid-companies, it doesn\u2019t make sense for them to negotiate digital health suppliers other than via the regular institutions. (An exception would be if the regular institutions don\u2019t <\/em>offer e-health recommendations to patients. In that case, the insurance company might.) It is at the core of our REshape Center at Radboudumc to explore possible use of technology to empower patients, family and informal care. Together with companies like Philips we work towards an eCo system to combine all those eGo systems (looking inward only).<\/p>\n

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Image credit : Philips<\/em><\/p>\n

The number of papers on digital health is increasing, but still with most of the technology only 12 or 24 months old, one can not expect a PhD thesis on it. It takes years for a technology to mature into stable usage patterns, and then at least two years to be studied and published \u2026 and by then reality has changed, as evidenced by the recent widely ridiculed article about fitness trackers in JAMA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Dr. Eric Topol<\/a> recently took part in a Fortune brainstorm on \u201cDoctors Offices Maybe Become a Thing of the Past<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n