There is no doubt that the multiple interconnecting challenges facing the healthcare system today are daunting and have certainly been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Facing demand that outstrips healthcare capacity on top of huge backlogs and waiting lists after the last two years, it is clear that we need new solutions if we are to deliver the ambition for a truly preventive and personalised healthcare system that helps us all to live healthier, longer and more fulfilled lives.
But the truth is that we have actually been handed a unique opportunity thanks to the pandemic itself. Many of the answers are staring us in the face.
Let me put it this way.
If I told you five years ago that it would be a normal part of everyday life to use at-home tests to self-diagnose against an infectious disease, and that you would receive test results on your smartphone and change your behaviour based on messages from an app, you simply would not have believed me.
Yet over the course of the last two years that is exactly what has happened, representing a stepchange in all of our lives and in how we think about, understand and deliver healthcare.
In a very short period of time we have become accustomed to determining the presence of illness ourselves, taking a proactive view of our health and modifying our behaviours when we understand why we should do so.
Looking across society as a whole we have rapidly changed how we deliver DIY at-home testing at scale and created unparalleled capacity and infrastructure to deliver tech-enabled remote diagnostics to the whole population.
In the UK for example, alongside a huge increase in health literacy amongst a population that now has a far greater understanding of how to engage in and proactively manage their own health, we have also built the lab capacity, smart diagnostics infrastructure and highly-trained staff that can be used to tackle another challenge – closing the gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy.
What we learnt and built during the pandemic has so much potential to help us to monitor and prevent conditions far beyond Covid-19, particularly long-term chronic illnesses that rob so many people of good health later in life.
Imagine being able to get the results of tests that monitor and spot the warning signs of diabetes or cardiovascular disease on your phone, followed by personalised information about how to make relevant changes to your lifestyle and behaviours in order to improve your health. That future is at our fingertips if we focus on achieving it.
We should be ambitious about securing the potential presented by mass testing to empower and deliver a transformation in healthcare away from treating people when they are already sick, to stopping people from getting sick in the first place.
Scalable, accessible testing and monitoring to spot the warning signs of disease – underpinned by technology and data – combined with seamless personalised communication, can also deliver huge benefits in terms of reduced costs and pressure on primary care, hospitals and the National Health Service.
On top of this, a healthy population will mean we are better prepared for future pandemics.
We threw all of the resources that we have at our disposal at the Covid-19 response, a fantastic achievement across the public, private and voluntary sectors, and it will be this continued collaboration between public and private that holds the key to driving this change in healthcare forward.
If we are to achieve our ambition for mass testing to help people better understand what is going on with their health and take proactive steps to prevent or delay the onset of chronic disease, then technology and innovation has an absolutely integral role to play.
Modifiable behaviours contribute to at least 60 per cent of deaths worldwide so the potential is huge if we get this right.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel – we already have a system in place that we can now build on to empower individuals to understand and take ownership of their health.
We have been presented with a historic opportunity by the way the Covid-19 changed how we think about our health and lifestyles, how we deliver healthcare and most of all by revolutionising our ability to use mass testing and remote diagnostics at an unprecedented scale.
If we seize this opportunity, we can emerge from the pandemic with a population that’s living longer, healthier lives.
