Digitalization in medicine changes doctor-patient relationship and opens up new business opportunities
ICT applied to medicine, like computational chemistry and ‘apps’, is key to ensuring the future sustainability of healthcare systems.
By Biocat
More than 70 people participated this morning in the networking breakfast held by CTecno on biotechnology, biomedicine and ICT, at the Barcelona Activa auditorium, where Montserrat Vendrell, Ignasi Belda and Víctor Bautista agreed that new technology applied to biomedicine is revolutionizing the healthcare sector both in its potential to innovate and generate data, and in the way it is changing the role of patients.
The growing ageing population leads to increased prevalence of chronic diseases and rising healthcare costs. Biocat CEO Montserrat Vendrell defended new technology applied to medicine as a very powerful tool to ensure the future sustainability of healthcare systems, taking into account that today 10% of the population accounts for 70% of all healthcare expenditure.
Vendrell also highlighted that new technology (genomics, the internet, social media, monitoring systems, mobile devices, telemedicine, processing biological data —big data—, etc.) is generating an explosion of health-related data that, if used correctly, can open up multiple paths of research and economic growth. The CEO of Biocat emphasized that "we need disruptive innovation" and that is why we have created the Design Health Barcelona (d·HEALTH Barcelona) training program, which will allow a small group of participants to get hands-on experience for eight months in a hospital setting —Hospital Clínic, Institut Guttmann or Sant Joan de Déu children’s hospital— in order to identify real un-met needs and design products to address them. d·HEALTH Barcelona is inspired by the prestigious Stanford Biodesign Fellowship.
Ignasi Belda, founder and CEO of Intelligent Pharma, a strongly internationalized local company focusing on providing computational chemistry solutions, explained that informatics applied to biopharmaceutical research is a source of innovation and new drugs, while also saving time and resources during the production process. Belda said that "you start with a molecule and you don’t know what side effects it will have. Using computational chemistry we can move this prediction forward." In his experience, "pharmaceutical companies have saved up to two years and €20 millions on research."
The personal and professional work of Víctor Bautista, director of SocialDiabetes, has been followed with much interest as an international success story forged from the entrepreneurship and drive of its founder, who was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago. SocialDiabetes was recognized by the Unesco and the United Nations in 2012 as one of the best health applications. It is an innovative self-management system for diabetes with mobile and online applications that allow patients to control their own condition and have real-time contact, through telehealth, with doctors if necessary. This application already has 13,000 downloads around the world, is available in eight languages, and, a year and a half after its creation, is now being developed as a business model. Countries like "Mexico and Chile want to implant it to cut costs in their healthcare systems," explained Bautista. By the end of the year, SocialDiabetes will have more than 2 million controls "and that will be useful for advanced diagnostics with smart systems. A university in Madrid has already expressed interest."
There is currently a lack of international legislation on mobile applications for the health sector, so the Barcelona Medical Association (COMB) is working on a project to create certification to validate the quality of apps.
Follow the debate on Twitter @CTecno_cat and @biocat_en with the hashtags #TIC #eHealth and #biotech
- Press release (22 May 2013)
- Press call
- Related news (2 May 2013)
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