Abstract
Over the past two hundred years mankind has made remarkable progress in health with life expectancy more than doubling and global population growing ten fold or 10X. The epidemiological transition from communicable to chronic disease, originally described by Omron in 1971, coupled with clinical workforce shortage and attrition will force healthcare systems to evolve to a new paradigm. This new paradigm I call Stay Left, Shift Left-10X (SL2-10X) which I introduced as CIO of Ireland’s Health Service Executive and is supported by the UNGA Digital Health symposia community proposes a new paradigm, policy, prescription and platform for coordinating collaborative digital health innovation towards a new kind of Health System which also proactively promotes and delivers wellness.
The SL2-10X paradigm is about first keeping people well and enabling self care, shared care in the home as the location of choice for healthcare.
Shift Left is about keeping well people well or if you have a chronic condition or need rehab a person can be best managed from home.
Shift Left is about moving patients as quickly as possible from Acute to a community to a home setting.
10X is the notion that Digital and Data Technology when applied to healthcare which is essentially an information management disciple and an information intensive industry leads to 10X or Ten fold outcomes (10X faster, 10X cheaper, 10X better, 10X higher Volume etc).
Coherent, consistent and cohesive digital health innovation in the common direction of Sl2-10X can lead to shifting the entire industry ‘left’ resulting in a radical transformation of individual health, population health, health systems and the entire health industry.
Nobel prize winner, Ilya Prigogine wrote “In a system that is far from equilibrium, smalls island of coherence have the ability to totally transform the entire system”. A metamorphism of our health system and associated values is entirely possible where “the rule of wellness” is equally prioritized with the “rule of rescue”,
Digital and Data provide the opportunity to proactively manage wellness and the use of internet of medical things devices such as continuous glucose monitoring devices will enable advanced and early detection and indeed reversal of chronic disease. The use of artificial intelligence or perhaps better augmented intelligence will give clinicians and indeed patients an extra pair of eyes helping detect disease and proactively recommending solutions.
To accelerate the phase transition from a presence, physician and disease centred health system to a person, wellness and more virtual health system will require concerted aligned efforts which be required to overcome the resistance that the medicine discipline is renowned for. To structure and align transition efforts SL2-10X is presented as a new paradigm, policy, prescription and platform for Digital Health Transformation. The presentation include multiple Living Lab examples of digital health solutions which enable patients and clinicians to Stay Left, Shift Left and deliver 10X benefits.