Keynote speaker Daniel Kraft, MD
A roadmap of the future of medicine, with its emphasis on technological innovation and improved diagnoses and treatments, was the focus of the fourth annual SinaInnovations conference on digital medicine, sponsored by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Held on campus on Tuesday, October 27, and Wednesday, October 28, SinaInnovations featured national experts in technology and clinical care who discussed the many innovations that are transforming the practice of medicine.
Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System, opened the conference. He said the topic of digital medicine reflected Mount Sinai’s role “at the forefront of change in medicine that ultimately will lead to better ways of preventing, diagnosing, and treating human disease.”
SinaInnovations was organized by Scott L. Friedman, MD, Dean for Therapeutic Discovery, Fishberg Professor of Medicine, Professor of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics, and Chief, Division of Liver Diseases, at the Icahn School of Medicine.
Keynote speaker Daniel Kraft, MD, Faculty Chair for Medicine and Neuroscience at Singularity University, which educates individuals and organizations about cutting-edge technologies, discussed the “exponential” pace of discovery taking place and the vast array of affordable health care apps, wearable devices, and other products available to consumers. This “democratization” of health care, he said, was creating “empowered consumers” and more transparent and proactive health care providers.
Dr. Kraft told the audience that caring for patients was shifting away from doctors’ offices and hospitals. The affordability of tablets and “computers the size of a grain of rice that connect to almost all of our medical devices,” as well as the Internet, are changing where health care takes place. “Health care is coming to our homes and bodies,” he said.
A panel discussion on “Educating the Digital Doctors of Tomorrow,” which included experts from The University of California, San Francisco; the Cleveland Clinic; Oregon Health and Science University; and Google Life Sciences, cited the need to change medical school curricula at this transformational time. Panel participants suggested rethinking what students need to memorize versus what they can offload to a smartphone, and teaching students how to use the new tools available to them. The panelists also pointed out that students should be taught to listen to patients with empathy, and not simply enter data into electronic health records without making eye contact—a powerful temptation at this time of increased mechanization.
Nigam H. Shah, MBBS, PhD
Another group of SinaInnovations panelists who discussed precision medicine highlighted the need for enhanced platforms and algorithms that would enable scientists to translate huge amounts of population-health data into information that could be used to treat individuals.
“This is an inflection point,” said Nigram H. Shah, MBBS, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at the Stanford School of Medicine. “Change is starting to happen. We will rapidly find ourselves in uncharted waters in the way we collect data, make decisions, and counsel patients.”
A discussion on the “Digital Hospital of Tomorrow” examined the numerous ways in which the patient experience is changing, as well. A case in point was Humber River Hospital in Toronto that recently reopened after an extensive renovation that included full digitalization. The hospital’s executives—Barb Collins, Chief Operating Officer, and Rueben Devlin, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer—shared their experiences in creating a hospital that uses robots to mix drugs and deliver goods, and offers bedside touch screens that allow patients to Skype with their families and video chat with their nurses and doctors.
“Hospitals of the past were built around the providers,” said Dr. Devlin. Today, they are “all about patients and their families.”