e patient could stay at home longer and only come to the hospital to obtain expertise on very complex problems, or treatments requiring technical platforms that are difficult to transpose.
In turn, the tendency to hospital-centrism could fade, or at least take another form “The hospital [will] be repositioned: it will be able to radiate through telemedicine, and its physical footprint will be exceeded by its footprint intellectual, which should be valued. ”In this regard, these hospitals of the future could constitute, in addition to sophisticated treatment structures, powerful data centers.
The enhanced expertise of the citizen and the patient
Today, with the developments mentioned, the individual has important health information at their fingertips. It can also actively contribute to its development with the active support of increasingly large social networks. Therefore, the patient now has the keys to participate fully in your therapeutic journey and he has a critical capacity at all stages of his disease (from his diagnosis to his treatment through his drug prescription ). Citizens have the ability to organize their health trajectory, by warning themselves of the risks for it.
Beyond information, the wave of self-quantified / self-management allows the patient to develop a critical reading of his illness, the intuitiveness of the tools (popularization of information, adaptation to the person), their integration in everyday objects (smartphones, tablets, social media), the convergence of data for comparative purposes (PatientLikeMe) and finally, the algorithms which orient its behavior helping it (silent procedures for adapting to data in real time).
This newly acquired theoretical and practical knowledge leads to rebalancing the patient / doctor relationship, in the sense that the patient becomes more enlightened, even expert and autonomous in the management of his health. This need to enter a “patient-centric” dimension in the MIT Technology Review recalling that “the person least used in the healthcare system is the patient”.
Technologies for data collection and analysis on Smartphones are part of this movement from the “centric patient”, expressing this refocusing on the patient of numerous activities of early detection of the disease, follow-up or care. The tests conventionally carried out in the laboratory will soon be possible on your Smartphone (some are already done such as glucose level, blood pressure, etc.). The Smartphone could thus become “a laboratory on a chip” (“lab on a chip”), the next step in the digitization of the patient being the “laboratory in the body” (“lab in the body”), this expression symbolizing the ability to develop nanotechnologies which can be integrated into the human body and which can provide continuous information on the state of health. However, this change is not without consequences.
First, the relationship between doctors and patients is changed. Not all doctors are prepared for this evolution of the patient, who may develop resistance to it. From a practical point of view also, the consultation time (in general medicine) remains limited (16 minutes on average), making it difficult to introduce a possibly contradictory debate confronting the expertise of the patient with that of the doctor. The place of social networks and discussion forums being more and more large, these could appear in the future as a complement to the traditional relations of doctor-patient consultation.
Second, a question relates to the quality of the expertise developed by the patient. One of the dangers highlighted in this report is to observe an expertise of the patient or of the citizen based at least in part on erroneous information, or information which requires a minimum of expertise and technicality to be understood. public information, social networks, performance objectives integrated into connected tools). The quantity and variability of information are involved in particular in the emergence of cybercondriaques: the invasion of information and data produced by multiple sensors which graduall