Studies show that business leaders believe their job is more stressful than it was five years ago. Theyâre working longer hours, are more physically inactive, and eating ready-to-go meals that lack nutrition. This all adds up to a wholly unbalanced lifestyle. Increased stress results in an increased risk of illness. The need for executives to maintain a healthy, balanced lifestyle is more important than ever if theyâre to survive the constant pressure of this fast-paced environment. They need a unique solution that balances health and wellness with the demands of their work. It doesnât necessarily mean a couple of hours sweating on a treadmill or pumping iron at an ungodly hour in the gym or foregoing the weekend beers. It will certainly mean less of a sedentary lifestyle, less junk food and more exercise and better eating habits. So how does the busy executive strike the balance, and find time to make health and wellness part of his or her hectic daily schedule? Discovery Executive Wellness has the answers, and if youâre one of those businesspeople who have neglected their health, this could change your life. It might even save your life. David OâSullivan spoke to Dr Ryan Noach, Deputy CEO of Discovery Health.
Ryan, what are we talking about when we speak about digital health care, whatâs that all about?
Much like many other industries around the world, David, the world of healthcare is being completely revamped by some of the innovation in the digital sector right across the healthcare chain weâre seeing majorly exciting developments that are just changing the way we diagnose disease, treat disease, the way patients interact with doctors, the way medical records are stored. To be honest, my view is healthcare has been too slow to embrace some of these trends, but Iâm quite sure that in years to come the way healthcare is going to be delivered will look very different to today.
My initial assumption was, if weâre talking about digital healthcare, it meant going onto the internet and diagnosing myself with whatever illness might prevail. I thought that might be dangerous, but itâs not doing that isnât it, itâs using technology to empower patients. Flesh it out for me Ryan, what is it that patients use, how does the technology work to give the doctors the correct data to help them with an accurate diagnosis?
Well, the consumer element that youâre talking about is very popular and becoming more and more popular and there are a large number of online sources of medical information that consumers use every day. Iâve heard doctors talking to each other saying to patients, âDonât confuse your Google search with my medical degreeâ, which is said in jest, but actually there is this consumerism happening around the world where consumers (and we believe strongly at Discovery), should become much more active about their healthcare. Healthcare is unfortunately, a situation where thereâs a real asymmetry of information. The patients are generally not well-informed; itâs a complex situation and they frequently are scared.
The doctors are typically very well-informed and so digital healthcare is crossing some of this divide and ensuring that there is a much better symmetry of information, that patients have reliable information at their fingertips. One of the things weâre seeing, where you started off with patients going online and searching for answers is the evolution of artificial intelligence, with very smart cognitive engines that have ingested huge volumes of data in the background and that with the very high confidence interval, can provide you an accurate answer a lot of the time. At Discovery weâre investing in one such service, which we will provide to Discovery members later this year.
This artificial intelligence engine is supported by many thousands of Doctors around the world and we hope by many thousands of Doctors in South Africa is able to answer a range of questions with a very high confidence interval. So certainly that is one part of it, but the other part of it that you were asking about is how does it help doctors make diagnoses? At the most simple level we see that central to a good diagnosis is having all the information at your fingertips. Electronic health records which have centralised the recorder of all clinical data in one place and given the doctors via their smartphones or their tablets or web access immediate comprehensive clinical history for the patient theyâre treating, is extremely powerful in and of itself. We see anecdotes. Discovery Health ID is an application that does this for doctors.
We have our 2200 doctors using it every day in their practices and we see anecdotes every day of how this changes doctorsâ practice. Iâll give you some concrete examples just to make it real. A dermatologist told us recently that a rash that he had currently been unable to diagnose, when he looked at the electronic health record on Health ID, he recognised that in fact, the timing of the rash was related to a medicine, a prescription prescribed by a doctor of which the patient had forgotten to tell him about and so he immediately linked the rash to the medicine, attributed it to an adverse drug interaction and resolved that situation. Sometimes there are far more serious circumstances.
We heard of an anaesthetist recently who was about to put a child to sleep for a simple anaesthetic and looked at the Health ID record on the Discovery Health ID platform and found that there was a critical cardiac defect that this child had that the mother had in her anxiety about the procedure completely forgotten to tell the anaesthetist about. It changed the way he delivered the anaesthetic. So from the relatively minor to the seriously important interventions, this centralisation of records is critical.
Weâve seen three waves of digital innovation in healthcare. The first starting in the early 2000âs was driven by the availability of 3G and devices becoming much more portable and that was really telemedicine, where one was able to get a consultation remotely and this changed certainly the way doctors have delivered care and consultations in remote places. The second wave, which started around 2010 or just before really related to the electronic health records that I have been talking about and where enterprise solutions that centralised recordkeeping and provided a single uniform digital platform for all clinical records.
Weâre right in the teeth now of the third wave of digitisation, which is much more about empowering the consumer. Itâs about using Big Data to find disease inflection points, where diseases are going to get worse, where patients are at risk to on a personalised basis tell patients that theyâre at risk to combine genetic information, to understand a risk profile, to use artificial intelligence to support diagnostics and then to connect to the doctor and the patient to each other in a very seamless and portable way and so weâre right in the teeth of this third wave of digital healthcare now.
Iâm also impressed with the technology thatâll empower patients to take responsibility. The wearable or even ingestible automatic devices that monitor and transmit relevant information, tell me a bit more about that, Ryan.
This term has been coined, âthe quantified selfâ and patients are really able these days (I shouldnât say patients), people are really able these days to measure everything about themselves. I wear a wearable device every day, I measure how many steps I take, I look at my heart rate through the day, I measure the intensity of my exercise and these wearables are advancing to be able to measure stress, to track your sleep, to track all aspects of your behaviour and we really are able to quantify everything around ourselves through these sophisticated sensors.
As you say, they have advanced to the point where now there are ingestible sensors too. You swallow a pill, itâs a smart pill and itâs able to make all sorts of measurements and readings inside your intestines and transmit that through Bluetooth or another mechanism to a device externally and so you can make diagnosis from the inside out. Ultimately, our view is that this quantified self-environment, all these different measures will be combined with genetic measures or precision medicine to really personalise healthcare. Itâll mean that for a particular individual, your own personal physiology which is being measured, your own personal diagnostics in the context of your genetic makeup will really mean that you can get a personal healthcare tailored solution to your particular risks and needs.
In South Africa, do the medical aid schemes keep pace with the technology; do they understand that, does the council for medical schemes understand what is happening with increased digitisation around the world?
I think everybody in the healthcare sector is feeling this digitisation and itâs impossible to hold it back. Itâs being thrust upon us and consumers are adopting it broadly everywhere. I can only speak for Discovery and at Discovery weâve really embraced these technology trends in a large way. Weâve delivered Discovery Health ID for four years now. Over the four years itâs been a hard process of changing the way doctors consult with patients to get them to use a digital interface as part of the consultation process, but as I said earlier weâre now seeing doctors very engaged and more than 2000 of them are using it every single day and a large number are using it intermittently. It really means results at their fingertips. So in terms of that second wave weâve been successful.
From the quantified self perspective our Active Rewards Benefit, particularly using the Apple watch as the wearable device (which you can get for free on a fully funded basis if youâre continually active), has meant that weâve seen a huge number of people, 300 000 of our members in a very short space of time actively measuring and tracking their activity, their physical activity, being incentivised through weekly rewards that we offer to meet targets, Weâve seen a precipitous improvement, (way beyond what we actually ever expected, to be frank), in the activity levels of these members. Weâve seen on average, a 24 percent increase in the activity levels of all Active Rewards members and for those wearing the wearable device, the Apple watch in our context, their activity has increased by almost 80 percent.
Tell me about the investment in DNA sequencing. I see that in the United States itsâ getting funding in the amount of R55bn last year alone, thatâs a phenomenal amount of money. It seems that people can send saliva samples for analysis to quantify their genetic susceptibility to a wide range of diseases. Is that something that is encouraged here in South Africa, Ryan?
Yes, itâs a rapidly evolving side of medicine and I think if I were back at medical school today that would probably be the field I would want to choose as the explosive growth field. Just over two years ago we were nowhere near as advanced as we are today. There are two things happening, theyâre recognising more and more of the important sites within the genetic DNA, within the DNA makeup that are relevant sites in respective diseases and risk factors and so this is a big mapping exercise of millions and millions of data streams to try and find exactly which part of your genome, your genes are responsible for a risk or a health issue and then the second part of it is that because itâs becoming so commoditised itâs becoming much more affordable. Therefore, we have more information thatâs more accessible and you can imagine what that means for diagnostics and for interventions.
In many parts of the world now itâs routinely screened. In South Africa, thatâs not the case yet, itâs certainly not routine. There are very few sites (two that I know of in South Africa), that are able to sequence the full genome (in other words, the mapped out portion of the DNA) and they are still for research purposes, they are not really being used commercially yet, so most of the sequencing in South Africa is actually being done overseas where a full exome sequence is required. In oncology medicine the treatment of certain tumours is now very closely linked to the genetic makeup of those tumours and so it has become routine including in South Africa to do genetic analysis of many of the tumours for cancer treatment plans.
So for somebody who wants to embrace the technology, is the Apple watch one of the fundamental starting points?
Well, it doesnât have to be the Apple watch. Weâve partnered Apple as a leading technology supplier, but we partner other wearable suppliers too and I would really encourage, and our data demonstrates a material improvement in physical activity and engagement in physical activity or understanding of what your body is doing and needing through the use of a wearable device, so I would say, get on the train and join this quantified self world, get a wearable and track your behaviour day-to-day.
Whereâs the best place to get information, the Discovery website?
The Discovery website certainly, on the Active Rewards Page, has a lot of information about this and if you go to the reliable Google site and you Google wearable devices, thereâs a fortune of information there.
