Here's a couple of posts on the Future of Medicine.
http://singularityhub.com/2016/08/22/exponential-medicine-2016-the-future-of-health-care-is-coming-faster-than-you-think/
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-why-an-uber-for-healthcare-may-not-happen-20160201-column.html
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/action/wash-explainer/
Key takeaways:
1. The "8 Areas to Watch": 1) The Connected, Interactive Home 2) Medical Tricorders to Connected Emergency Kits 3) Healthcare Chatbots 4) VR in the OR to AR on the Streets 5) From Quantified Self to Quantified Health 6) Uber for Health 7) Cancer Moonshots 8) Crowdsourced ‘Omic's...
... are all underpinned by the way data flows and disparate systems are able to connect with each other (interoperability) - which we haven't quite got right - or ubiquitous - yet. In healthcare, there is an important translation from "Physical to Digital back to Physical" delivery that has been (for the most part) overcome by logistic mechanisms like Uber's, but whether it's efficient or a wise investment of healthcare resources remains an argument to be proven.
2. The bigger question is who is addressing (and how) the dissonance between payment and ownership: the challenge (as identified in Michael Hiltzik's article) is that the person paying and the person receiving the service are often two different people. It's a rare thing in healthcare that they are the same person, without government compensation in one form or another (as it is in Australia) or insurance dropping the price to enable it to be palatable.
3. In a global context, we're still struggling to provide the basics of healthcare: clean water and sanitation. Combined with any lag in access to education, or the skill to assess if this is the best or most trustworthy information to use to inform one's subsequent actions, we still have a number of hurdles to overcome before "full stack" healthcare is available to everyone anytime and everywhere.
