Tag: Health & Wellbeing Summit

In 1950’s it was estimated that the medical literature doubled every 50 years. By 1980 it was doubling every 3.5 years and by 2020 it will double every 73 days! More than 8000 new medical articles come out every day. This makes impossible for clinicians to keep up with such volume of data. The information out there is unstructured and is coming in different forms and from different sources. The only way our medical specialists can cope with the digital reality is with the help of artificial intelligence. During Webit.Festival Europe the Deputy Chief Health Officer for IBM Watson Health Dr. Lisa Latts explained how the latest technological advancements in this field will transform the world of healthcare in the next decades.

“We have made a lot of advancements in medical technology. Imagine the advancements we could have made if instead of just a fraction of data, we were able to access the entire lexicon of data that is available for an individual. Think what we could do and think of the price of not knowing”, she said.

Now, many patients are not able to get the right cancer treatment, because doctors don’t know the exact characteristics of the individual tumor. People with chronic diseases don’t have access to the right medicine, because their doctors don’t have their full medical history. All of these cases are going to change with the help of Big Data. But first, experts, like the ones working in IBM, must deal with several challenges. There are a lot of bad sources of data out there, so you need to be able to separate the true from false. Doctors have got data from medical records, laboratory data, medical literature, radiology data. So they need to be able to aggregate all those forms of information to get a complete picture of what is going on with an individual. If we combine all these we will start to get to the true value of the data and start to really do things with it in terms of what we are delivering to an individual patient. [caption id="attachment_5068" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Deputy Chief Health Officer for IBM Watson Health Dr. Lisa Latts[/caption] We are now in in the Third age of computer technology. The first age in the early 1900’s was the Tabulating systems era - computers that basically can do math and count. Then in the 1950’s we started with Programmable computers and we are still in that age today where we have computes that we can give a variety of information and tell them what to do with it. There is so much information available now that it is impossible to program all the characteristics and all the possible programs. So that brings us to the Cognitive computers era. IBM Watson started to work on this in the early 2000’s and 15 years after that was the official launch of Watson Health. A cognitive computer is different from programmable computer, because it can understand, reason, learn and interact. All of this allows Watson to harness entire bodies of data. It can actually read through the data it is fed to it.

“There is no way that a clinician can keep up with that amount of information, but Watson can. It can read million pages in a second and understand them. It can learn. So it will digest the data and will come up with evidence-based conclusions as a result. Those conclusions may or may not be right, so it takes humans to train Watson in terms of what is right and what is wrong. And it gets better and better over time”, Dr. Latts explained.

All this is possible thanks to the Watson Health Platform. It allows IBM to create an ecosystem, which can be used by developers within the company and outside. This has expanded to a network of collaborators and partners creating innovation across the world. Lisa Latts is sure that artificial intelligence will not replace human doctors. Instead, the combination of humans and Watson creates augmented intelligence, that will help them focus on the fields they are better than the machine. It will free up physicians and clinicians for what people and doctors do best - interactive communication. To do their job in the best way possible, physicians need to use interpersonal communication, compassion and to be able to abstract, generalize and dream. Meanwhile, cognitive computer systems are good at taking vast amount of data and come to conclusions. All these factors are used to advance evidence-based care. Traditionally we say that in medicine it takes 17 years for a breakthrough to be translated into clinical best practice. But in the dynamic society we live in, we don’t have the luxury to wait that long any more. Using a Watson-powered solution, clinicians аре quickly armed with evidence-based and ranked treatment options for their consideration. Recommendations based on the patient’s condition and medical evidence are available in approximately 30 seconds. A physician have to read 29 hours each work day to stay up-to-date with the latest medical literature. Watson needs only 3 seconds to read 200 million documents.

“Today we are working on a variety of solutions from cancer care to evidence-based care in a value-based care setting to life science. We, Watson Health, aspire to improve lives and give hope delivering innovation to address the world’s most pressing health challenges through data and cognitive insights”, Latts said.

You may watch her full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

We are living in amazing times, often described as the Fourth industrial revolution. Right now it is an incredible time to be involved in technology with its major impact and ability to empower people going forward into the future. There are many aspects of our everyday life that are going to change dramatically due to the effect of the new technological advances, but healthcare is probably the field, that is going to be transformed the most. The reason for that is that right now the healthcare systems around the world are inefficient, bureaucratic and expensive. This is a multitrillion-dollar industry which will be disrupted by thousands of startup companies, along with giants like Google, IBM, Apple, Samsung and dozens of others. At Webit.Festival Europe our guests had the chance to listen to one of the innovators of this incredibly important field for the humanity and the first surgeon, who streamed live operation using Google Glass to 14 000 students across 132 countries - the Co-founder of Virtual Medics & Medical Realities Prof. Shafi Ahmed. During his opening keynote he spoke about the future of the surgical education around the globe and the best ways to disrupt a conservative industry, like healthcare.

“Clinical practices are full of dogma and tradition but they want to change. I’m impressed by Bulgaria. You had amazing people here to begin with and all of this happening at Webit is quite a good enabler to think about how to change the world we live in. So please think about disrupting your minds and moving on to a world of exponential medicine”, he told the guests in the packed Blue hall.

The famous surgeon is sure that we are approaching the age of singularity - a point at which the machines and computers will become better doctors and surgeons than humans. According to him the best way to facilitate this process is to stop being obsessed with the human touch and the human flavour of clinical practice. The reason for this is that we often visit a doctor for minor problems, like a cough or even a repeat prescription, that we can easily solve online. [caption id="attachment_4960" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Co-founder of Virtual Medics & Medical Realities Prof. Shafi Ahmed.[/caption] In the new digital reality we need access to health services immediately and not waiting for appointments and the new technologies give us the tools to achieve that via Virtual and Augmented Reality and even commonly used software, such as Skype. Suddenly this is disrupting the pure doctor-patient relationship that we have all accepted for being the best. And there is a lot more to come in the next few years. With avatars and facial recognition technology doctors can transport themselves in VR to other parts of the world and connect to patients there.

“They call me a virtual surgeon, but I think we will be a lot more virtual in the future. We are now producing software technology that enable holoportation - visual transportation in VR. Imagine that you need some advice and a person from other parts of the world are transporting themselves to your operating theatre to help you”, Prof. Ahmed said.

He thinks that democratizing the medical education is crucial for our future because today more than 5 billion people across the world don’t have access to safe surgery and this costs millions of lives every year. In Barts Medical School, where Shafi Ahmed is an Associate Dean, students are taught to use technology in different ways than the doctors working today. Part of this new agenda is the Barts X Medicine course where students can learn from venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, coders and people from the Silicon Valley. The school is organizing an annual hackaton and the team that wins receive crowdsourced funding for 3 months to create something substantial for patients care. This is a real disruption of education because in the near future we will need creative doctors, who can enable people, create designs, have innovative ideas and know the path from idea to its fruition. Prof. Ahmed pointed out Big Data, Genome Sequencing, AI and 3D Printing as the technologies that are going to bring the biggest changes in healthcare in the years to come. Meanwhile, the development of robotics will lead to automation of diagnostics and surgical procedures and in the long-term to replacing doctors with machines. You may watch Prof. Shafi Ahmed’s full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

Today, healthcare is inefficient, bureaucratic and expensive. It is a multi-trillion industry, that will be among the most transformed sectors over the next 10 years. Thousands of startups, along with giants, such as Google, IBM, Apple, Samsung and many others are entering the race to revolutionize the way we treat human diseases today. This will lead to much more sound, effective and cheap health care. To understand upcoming changes in the best possible way, we asked Prof. Shafi Ahmed a few questions about the future of Healthcare. He is among the most recognized visionaries in the world of medicine and one of the top-level speakers at Health & Wellbeing Summit - part of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe.

What do we need to change in our medical education system to answer the needs of tomorrow?

Medical teaching is still very traditional yet technology is advancing exponentially. We need to look at modern methods of teaching the digital doctors of tomorrow. With my company Medical Realities we are utilising augmented and virtual reality to add a different dimension in immersive learning. I have also introduced a new programme called Barts X for our medical students which teaches our students on innovation and entrepreneurship which is essential in creating future leaders.

You are known as a visionary. How do you imagine the medicine after ten years?

We are currently undergoing the 4th industrial revolution with the fusion of technologies like AR, VR, Robotics, AI, Big Data and the use of wearable technology which will radically change the doctor patient relationship and how we practise medicine. This is the most exciting time to be involved in medicine. When a patient asks for advice the first point of contact will be artificial intelligence rather than a doctor. The doctor’s role will undoubtedly change. A number of specialties like radiology and dermatology will be largely replaced by sophisticated AI. We will consult remotely using AR and VR and monitor our patients using a mixture of wearables, injectables and ingestible sensors. The cost of genomic profiling will be cheap and will allow us to deliver precision and personalised medicine.

What are the biggest medical threats to humanity?

The biggest threats are going to be new infectious diseases like the Ebola virus which can cause devastation quickly. The inequality of the provision of basic surgery globally will affect the well-being of 5 billion people.

How will technology improve our health and increase our life expectancy?

There is much interest in looking at ageing as a disease which will be modified with either medicine or a gene altering process allowing us to live longer.

What is the biggest technological breakthrough in medicine in recent years?

The unravelling of the complete human genome and reducing the cost of profiling to $1000. The discovery of the CRISPR - Cas9 gene editing which is currently the simplest, most versatile and precise method of genetic manipulation. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.