How can we detect diseases earlier?

As the management saying goes “you can’t manage it if you can’t measure it”. The same is true of healthcare. Disease is best treated —and at lower cost—when  identified early. This is particularly true of chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease. Regular monitoring can help deliver timely, appropriate and tailored healthcare.

When it comes to diagnosis, the first question often is: What are early indicators of a disease? Where the causes of a disease are unknown this can prove to be a hard question to answer. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, our ability to identify the causes is also limited by our lack of  understanding of how the brain functions.  Strides are being made in this field however, with the most advanced and detailed mapping of the brain achieved two years ago by German and Canadian researchers. They mapping, which is 3D, has achieved a resolution of 20 micrometers (thinner than a single hair). In the United States, the $300 million brain mapping initiative aims to map the interactions between the approximately 100bn neurons in a brain.

When early indicators are hard to identify, a second-best approach is to track the symptoms, which are often easier to list and, in some cases—like cervical or breast cancer—fairly easy to recognize. New diagnosis technologies have ushered in improvements in healthcare across the board.

In particular, the wave of miniaturization of the past decades has brought diagnostics and healthcare monitoring technologies to remote or impoverished areas. Portable ultrasound devices the size of a cell phone such as GE’s Vscan, for example, can now be used to monitor pregnant women in remote areas, thus improving maternal and infant health—in 2010, nearly one-third of pregnant women in West Africa did not receive antenatal care by skilled personnel. Portable healthcare equipment can also help reduce costs.  A pilot project testing the concept of e-health in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, for example, showed annual cost savings of up to $2,000 per elderly patient.

Similarly, improvement in information and communication technologies has facilitated the provision of tailored healthcare at a distance. Known as telemedicine, it is employed in both developed and developing countries, including the UK, Mexico, India and North Korea. Often used for remote diagnosis via phone or video, telemedicine could soon allow doctors to perform complex surgery from far away using robots. Such an operation has already been performed by a surgeon in the case of a heart operation in UK, albeit not far from the operation room. For longer distances, keeping time lag in check will be crucial for the safety of the patient. Remote surgery simulations performed in May between a hospital in Florida and one in Texas more than 1,200 miles away, for example, suggests that time lags of up to 500ms can be accommodated by surgeons.

All of these improvements have provided more efficient and less expensive healthcare. In an ageing and increasingly more populated world, such efficiencies and savings will be important to ensure that healthcare budgets do not overheat.

This article is published in collaboration with GE Look Ahead. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Dr Elie Chachoua writes for GE Look Ahead. 

Image: A researcher of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) holds Ebola diagnostic tests in Marcoule.
REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier