Yerevan State Medical University graduate, Visiting Professor of the Department of Genetics, founder and head of the Biobank of the University of Graz, Austria, Karine Sargsyan presented “The future of healthcare” report at the World Economic Forum “Digital Davos 2022” Summit.
“I am happy for this opportunity to talk to this very high-end audience today. I mean not only because it is Davos (which is really special), but also because I wasn’t sure of my future several years ago. I started to have hemiparesis during migraine attacks in 2018. What exactly means that the left part of my body began to hang like a dead flash and wasn't reacting to my brain’s orders. Do you know what a human being (especially a doctor) does in this situation? – Panic! But to my fortune, I got one of the best neurosurgeons in the world, who spent a very long time explaining to me – a doctor, the exact procedure”, Karine told, adding that if she would be born half of a century earlier, she would not be alive or would be absolutely disabled.
But now, according to her, although she ran through months-lasting short time memory loss period, which was horrible at that time, but funny if she looked back to that, she had the same brain capacity. “I mean thinking and logic, and I am extremely happy about it. This type of surgery is available only in the developed world. Today, I am standing here as one of the lucky humans who had the availability of an incredibly secure, but also very innovative and research-prone health system, as the one in Austria. Being a doctor, researcher, research manager, and patient, I see the future of medicine and healthcare in an integrative approach”, Karine Sargsyan emphasized. The future changes, according to her, will be in two different areas – the acting healthcare and forming healthcare.
The acting triad, as mentioned in the report, includes:
- Healthcare workers – doctors, nurses, therapists, etc. “And the question is, who will devote their lives to this very challenging profession? Just some numbers. In the USA, between 300 and 400 doctors commit suicide per year – it’s a doctor a day on average. Just some more statistics for plasticity of the message: in developed countries – for every hour spent with patients’ doctors are spending 1 and even 1,5 hours with paperwork (mainly for the insurance companies)”, Karine Sargsyan said. On the other hand, from her point of view, the new generation of doctors is interested in innovation and making better decisions, rather than in traditions and centuries-long working SOPs.
“Parallel to researching doctors, we will also have business-trained doctors (MD, MBA) and politics-trained doctors to make the right laws and fitting models for healthcare and medicine”, Karine Sargsyan added.
- Future diseases and new challenges. ”The future conditions and hotspots will be affected either by aging society (like sedentary lifestyle-related diseases – obesity and co, and psychiatric states – due to overload of information and sharper life competition) or by new kinds of infectious diseases and agents and/or consequences of “not recycling”- which is not only about infections, but about heavy metals drainage in drinking water, soil corrosion, and other effects, that we don’t know jet. We research to explore which diseases are most likely to cause the next global pandemic and racing to keep that from happening. Still, more resistant bacteria, viruses, or prions may cause another pandemic that we cannot even imagine today”, Karine Sargsyan assured.
- Future diagnostic and therapeutic technology, which is developing with enormous speed. “There is no doubt that our society is developing much faster than before. This also applies to medical technology, which has reached an incredible level today. But what is ahead of us? To mention some technologies, like:
- portable health monitoring tools or indicators – like my e-Watch,
- mobile applications providing medical support,
- artificial intelligence in medicine, which becomes precisely accurate, especially in the picture-based diagnostics,
- genome editing technology – that may once be the trend for xenotransplantation,
- biohacking- against the expectations, the main goal of biohacking is noble – to bring the human body to a new qualitative level, improving well-being and refining vital processes”, YSMU Visiting Professor noted.
The forming triad of future healthcare and medicine, according to her, is about:
- Healthcare trends. “In 2004, we were speaking about personalized medicine, and several years ago came term precision medicine out and started to even more tend the healthcare to the single person. The preventive enhancing approach, digital healthcare, integrated (into daily life) medicine, etc., will become usual. The future is not about how we treat diseases, but how we prevent them from occurring”, Karine Sargsyan emphasized.
- Health system challenges. “We need to fight the idea of seeing a hospital as a business. We need to enhance affordability. In the future, we will overcome the problem of payability and affordability in favor of health accessibility, system and best quality sustainability, integrative health patient experience, and simply better health”, she thought.
- The enablers like regulatory enhancements, researching and curing medicine symbiosis, new integrative organizational and business models, and healthcare (technological) platforms which will make future medicine more accessible if politics keep the speed of technological and curative development. “In the future, we will be able to heal wounds in minutes, grow full-fledged organs, bones and cells, create human-powered equipment, repair damaged brains, and much more. Integrative healthcare infused with a human approach, holistic well-being, and comfort supported by high-end diagnostic and therapeutic technology will be the main factor, so – in the future, not the virus or any other infective agent will be contagious, but the health itself.
I want to finish with the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” So, we need to act with heart in healthcare”, YSMU Visiting Professor concluded.
