The dawn of a new era

Our quest to digitize our health may have begun more than 500 years ago. One of the greatest minds to have lived, Leonardo da Vinci, drew up plans for a device that would track how far a Roman soldier had walked.[i] He believed that one day, technology would exist that could measure and report on our health for our own, and other’s interests. Fast-forward to the present day, and some of these sketches are now real, having a tangible impact on our lives.

According to a recent report from Accenture on health technology trends after 2020, 70% of consumers globally expect technology to become “more” or “significantly more” prominent in their lives over the next three years.[ii] And, 85% of health executives believe technology has become an inextricable part of the human experience.1 As our experience of the world becomes more and more digital, what can we expect from technology in the short and long-term when it comes to our health?

In the short term, technology has allowed care to continue and offered protection from exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can now attend your medical appointments over the phone or order certain prescriptions from an app. But perhaps, what’s more, exciting for us in the longer term, is the power technology has to unlock a new wave of innovation that could revolutionize the way we manage our health. Digital Health will become essential in optimizing the variables that IVF depends on, transforming the patients’ experience of fertility treatment. It will do so in three ways. Firstly, it will bring physicians and patients closer together, in turn offering greater support to patients. Secondly, it will enable remote monitoring, and with this will come continuous insights & data on the treatment, even more, empowering physicians. Finally, Digital Health will enable new artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support physicians to gain new insights and continuously improve treatment.

As a science and technology company, Merck is proud to be at the forefront of this movement and I am excited about our new partnership with Philips, a leading health technology company. Together, we want to take the fertility journey to new horizons for both patients and clinics alike. We believe that the new wave of digital health needs to combine the best that consumer health tech and the pharmaceutical industry have to offer, ensuring that we learn from one another to develop truly integrated solutions. It is through symbiotic relationships like this that we can open the door to change – imagine if monitoring devices or mobile apps that are easy to use and accessible to consumer audiences can then share accurate, clinically actionable, medical-grade information for use by healthcare professionals to manage treatment in real-time. Such a solution would not only make the treatment process more streamlined and convenient, but could also incite a swing towards dynamic personalization of medicine – a world where healthcare professionals know how well their treatment decisions are performing in real-time and are empowered to make changes to dosage, or amend a drug regimen at the earliest possible opportunity. These new data streams could in the future then be analyzed using AI to provide new treatment options for IVF physicians.

We are witnessing a surge in healthcare interest from the world’s biggest technology companies and this is something to be excited about. This is a significant step in the road to making precise health tech accessible to consumers which is key if we are to involve patients more closely in the management of their own health. It’s time to merge easy-to-use consumer health tech with precise clinical health tech to provide new solutions for physicians, which allow them to be closer to patients and gain deeper insights into their treatment progress. We are not alone in walking this path – the possibilities for innovation are endless.

Realizing the potential of digital technology does not mean reducing the ‘human touch’ of healthcare. It is actually about the opposite; developing applications and devices that increase the value of healthcare for patients and clinics, ensuring that every human interaction is as meaningful as possible. In the world of fertility treatment, Digital Health and home monitoring have the potential to reduce the amount of time that patients spend at the clinic for tests whilst enabling clinicians to make real-time decisions, but this is only the beginning. What the future holds is yet to be seen, and we have already come so far beyond what da Vinci dreamed of all those years ago. I have no doubt that if we combine the expertise, resources, and ambition of the tech and pharmaceutical industries, we will see the dawn of a new era.

[i] Ajana, Btihaj. 2017. Digital Health and the Biopolitics of the Quantified Self. Digital Health. 3. 10.1177/2055207616689509.

[ii] Accenture. 2020. Digital Health Tech Vision 2020. [online] Available at: https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/insights/health/accenture-digital-health-technology-vision-2020 [Accessed 21 December 2020].