Will concerns about privacy be as big an obstacle as some seem to think?
Almost half of the global population now owns a smartphone, indicating a certain comfort with being “connected,” and once you are connected, how much privacy is really left?
Of course, there will be those concerned about intrusion of privacy when it comes to providing detailed information about their health and especially exploitation of their personal disease information and the potential for outright abuse of it. As Dr. Blakey said at RDD, “people don’t really like being spied upon.”
But plenty of people have already contributed to the universal medical knowledge by donating their detailed personal information in the form of saliva to services like 23andMe or in the form of blood samples to networks like PatientsLikeMe. And individual patients accept that their healthcare providers and insurers retain a lot of data on them.
It does not take too much fantasy to imagine the world in which most, if not all people, will see the benefits of the high precision analyses of the data from many “Me”s to enable them to take the best possible care of their health. The trick will be to anonymize the information from connected inhalers and other sources to minimize the risks of misuse of the data.
Other industries have increasingly adopted a business model making it possible for much of the world’s population to have practically limitless access to other humans and their collective knowledge for next to nothing in seconds, but these cost and access trends are not happening yet in healthcare.
In fact, the timelines and costs of development of new treatments have been growing, making new medicines less accessible to many in need. Can we change this trend in respiratory healthcare through a profound growth in the quantity and quality of information made possible through communication and analytics tools?
The recent acquisition of technology and services company Flatiron Health by Roche for $1.9 billion shows that the value of information collection and analysis using cloud cooperation between key stakeholders – including patients, health care providers and regulators – is vast for pharma companies working in a particular disease “ecosystem.”
