Diagnose or Distract: When Tech meets Health

7 min readApr 26, 2019

The below is taken from my introduction to an event hosted by Deloitte Ventures entitled Diagnose or Distract: When Tech Meets Health”. The introduction was aimed to frame debate and discussion around four key questions:

Does technology improve, or distract, the way we care for patients?
Who is responsible for technology’s impact on health: citizens, governments, regulators or tech companies?
What opportunities does technology provide to improve workplace wellbeing?
How do everyday tech products impact the way we live our lives?

Good afternoon, and it’s a pleasure to have so many of you with us today. I think this is a testament to the fact that both technology and healthcare are topics deeply embedded in our everyday lives. And it’s not just those in the room who are engaged on this topic. Between 2010 and 2018, global investment in digital health companies in grew more than ten times (1), and tech companies have been getting in on the act as well, with Amazon’s acquisition of Pillpack (2), Apple’s ResearchKit and Carekit (3) and Google Deepmind’s partnership with the NHS (4), to name just a few examples.

So why am I interested in this topic? For the last five years, I have been advising health organisations on their strategy, and have become increasingly interested in the role of technology. As I started reading and learning more about this space, I realised two things. That we should be incredibly excited, but also very cautious, about the potential for technology in health. As an example, think about your relationship with your phone. How many of you have checked your phone in the last hour? [All hands went up!] According to a national survey, the average person checks their phone every 12 minutes, and spends 24 hours per week online (5). Whilst there are lots of apps that do great things for our health (like Headspace for mindfulness, or Strava for fitness), I think we should be wary of anything that takes up so much of our time.

Both health and technology are huge topics in and of themselves, and we can’t do them full justice in the time we have. So let’s start with technology’s role in patient care; everyday technology’s impact on health; and who is responsible for making sure we get the best from both.

Technology’s role in patient care

Is the screen helpful, or creating a barrier between a human interaction?

The NHS was set up in 1948 to serve a very different population to the one we have today: people lived 5 years less on average, infant mortality was 7x higher (6). Since then, the proportion of our GDP spent on health is expected to have doubled by 2020 (7), yet we still have a strained service, which has a real impact on patient care. A very sobering statistic from a survey of 2,000 mental health patients is that during the lengthy wait to see a doctor, one in six patients in had attempted suicide (8).

If technology provides an opportunity to support better patient care, we should embrace it, and that seems to be the view of the current health secretary Matt Hancock (9). So what might these opportunities look like?

The first is prevention: let’s start with diabetes. Over three million people in the UK have been formally diagnosed with diabetes, and the disease costs the NHS £25,000 every minute (10). The National Diabetes Prevention Program was set up to ensure fewer people suffer from this condition, and now has a pioneering digital stream, where five health tech companies are piloting digital interventions (11). Another example is in efficiencies. Research shows that automating standard processes, such as appointment booking and prescription processing, could save the NHS £12.5bn a year, or 10% of its annual running costs (12). As well as saving money, reducing the admin burden would be a big help to the 9 in 10 GPs who are at high risk of burnout. (13)

This is all incredibly positive, but we have to balance this optimism with the reality of what’s happened before.

In 2002, following a whirlwind meeting with Bill Gates around the role of technology in healthcare, Tony Blair hosted a 90 minute seminar at 10 Downing Street, where the decision was made to bring NHS technology into the 21st Century — also known as the NHS Program for IT (14). As I’m sure you all know — this vision was not achieved. After painful delays and sunk costs, the programme was eventually scrapped in 2010 at an estimated cost of over £10bn to taxpayers (15).

Wasted money is one thing, but what about technologies that put patients in danger? In the case of Theranos, a blood testing startup once valued at $9bn, the underlying technology was found to be ineffective, and dangerously so.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, this technology put patients in ‘immediate jeopardy’ (16).

So it seems that both the upside, and downside, for technology within patient care are very high.

Everyday technology, and its impact on health

Smartphones and laptops have had positive impacts on a number of health determinants. The first is social connections: research shows that the quantity and quality of our social relationships affect a number of physical and mental health risk factors (17). By making the world a smaller place, technology has supported us to maintain relationships with friends and family, as well as building wider communities, despite distance and other barriers. Another example is flexible working: our generation are increasingly able to work remotely, reducing the average 56 minute commute which strains our mental and physical health (18), and giving us more agency over how we spend our time.

On the other hand, technology-driven changes to how we live our lives are not always positive.

In their incredible coverage of data on American teenagers over many generations, the Atlantic showed the launch of the iPhone coincided with a number of shifts in behaviour and emotional states. For example, since 2007, the percentage of teenagers who hang out with their friends has fallen dramatically; there was a rise in those who feel left out or lonely; and more struggles with good quality sleep. At the same time, traditional milestones toward adult independence like dating or having a drivers license are happening much later (19). There is strong correlation, but limited data on causation, between screen time and unhappiness. It is telling, though, that tech leaders from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates tried to raise their children in tech-restricted environments as much as possible (20).

Who is responsible?

Does everyone have the same incentives to develop healthy technology?

Tristan Harris, the founder of the Centre for Humane Tech, claims that technology product design has the potential to hijack a billion minds (21). He was a student at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, alongside tech company founders (22). Many apps take advantage of our psychological vulnerabilities. They are able to design addictive products, through variable rewards (21), the bright red notification button which our brain is primed to take notice of (23), and the big dopamine hit whenever we get a like (24). By increasing time on screen, they are able to drive revenue through adverts, but with a real cost to our attention spans (25).

When it comes to technologies designed specifically for health, what do we need to ask ourselves? Some might be:

How fast is too fast? Can you disrupt safely?
How much due diligence do investors and regulators need to do?
How can governments and civil servants do tech implementation better?

We are excited to discuss these topics with you, and we hope you have some great conversations today.

Diagnose or Distract: When Tech meets Health

Technology’s role in patient care

Everyday technology, and its impact on health

Who is responsible?

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Written by Ushma Baros

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