In the age of technologically advanced cancer screenings, self-driving cars, and smartphones that can pinpoint your exact location on the globe at any given moment, the healthcare system seems to fall largely by the wayside when it comes to growth and innovation. While some of our most significant scientific breakthroughs aimed at improving the lives of people everywhere, when it comes to the way we handle the minutia of our healthcare, many times things fall through the cracks.
While there have been a large drive-in more recent years to create new treatment options, many times these techniques focus too heavily on a blanket goal. Not only is our innovation largely aimed at medical procedures and drugs tailored to caring for symptoms rather than preventing problems, but most local medical practices are far from high tech. Without the use of medical technology geared towards predicting possible illnesses before they occur, misdiagnosis is common, leading to almost 500 preventable medical deaths per day in the united states alone. Without the help of the latest in medical diagnosis programs, as well as a shift in the way we think about healthcare innovation, our medical programs are going nowhere fast. This is why we need to push for medical innovation that extends beyond drug development and large-scale treatment.
Seeking innovations
While many advancements have been made in the past five years alone when it comes to new medical procedures, most innovators focus on the idea of treating critical illnesses. Instead of thinking on a small scale, such as by developing treatments for early arthritis in the knees, they approach problems that are more threatening, such as cancer concerns. While these research programs are crucial to the development of our medicines and bring us closer to finally eradicating cancer, they do not reach to the heart of healthcare. At its core, healthcare should focus on treating and caring for a person’s health, not just taking care of them once they become incredibly sick. If healthcare innovation focused more on the everyday health issues facing millions of people, while still searching for a solution to more dangerous diseases, healthcare as a whole would progress exponentially.
In order to treat some of the most significant health issues facing us today, we should remember to start small and work to use simple programs and procedures to treat patients before symptoms become threatening. Innovation can be as important as increasing screening for genetic cancers, or as routine as blood pressure tracking. However, without the proper application of these techniques, and without constant innovation to drive their effectiveness forwards, people will continue to fall through the gaps. If we do not innovate within our healthcare soon, we may face a plateau in advancements. Moreover, that is a threat to everyone.