How Advanced Biomarker Monitoring Can Transform Healthcare

The following is a guest article by Hooman Abediasl, EVP of Product Engineering for Rockley Photonics.

The human body is a complex machine. Because there is seemingly no end to the ways in which the systems in your body interact, effectively tracking health conditions and identifying potential issues can be a challenge, often making it difficult to understand the implications for your health. When you visit your doctor and get a battery of tests, the results provide only a simple snapshot of your body at a singular point in time. What’s missing is the ability to monitor and track your personal health continuously and comprehensively over longer periods. This ability to provide a holistic view of what’s happening in your body requires a solution that can measure multiple biomarkers simultaneously and interpret the corresponding data.

Fortunately, this ability is getting closer to reality, primarily because of the expanded use of digital technology in healthcare. Only five or ten years ago, most healthcare providers did not have digital records for their patients. Systems were still very much paper-based. This lack of digital integration made it hard to gain long-term insights into a person’s health, which potentially limited the providers’ ability to get ahead in early disease detection. With the digitization of healthcare and the advent of new mobile monitoring devices, getting a more complete picture of your health is becoming increasingly possible.

However, to do this effectively, we need easy access to a larger amount of applicable health information. Specifically, we need to significantly enhance the range of biomarkers detected and measured by wearable sensors and medtech devices. A wearable device, for example, should be able to monitor multiple biomarkers — including core body temperature, blood pressure, body hydration, alcohol, lactose, urea, creatinine, and glucose trends, among others — to reveal important clues about an individual’s overall health.

Tracking individual biomarkers is only the first step. Understanding how these biomarkers interact with each other and other factors in the body is equally critical. Moreover, by aggregating and analyzing biomarker data across vast segments of the population, medical science could have the opportunity to develop deeper insights into how specific changes in individual biomarkers and sets of biomarkers could impact a person’s health. These insights could help push “precision medicine” to new heights, further enhancing the potential to predict, prevent, and treat disease.

Another trend that brings us closer to more meaningful health monitoring is the consumerization of healthcare. Patients today increasingly want proactive healthcare that’s enabled by round-the-clock, real-time tracking of their health and well-being. And they expect to get alerts and early warnings if anything is amiss. A good analogy is the “check engine” light in your car. When you see it, you might not know exactly what’s wrong with your car, but you do know it’s probably a good idea to go to a mechanic before your car breaks down.

Powering this societal shift is the rise of consumer-based wearables. Traditional medtech device-makers face increasing pressure to address this shift by asking themselves: Is it better to sell a smaller number of expensive, high-end devices with higher margins to hospitals and other medical facilities? Or is it better to extend their technology across a larger number of consumer-based devices that can be sold either directly or indirectly to millions of consumers? Even though the consumer devices initially may not have the same accuracy level as hospital-grade devices, this could be a huge opportunity for companies that successfully navigate these waters — and both medtech and consumer manufacturers are taking notice.

Furthermore, the steadily approaching transition from treating symptoms to early detection and prevention could fundamentally transform the entire healthcare system. Ben Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” More than two centuries later, his words are as appropriate as ever.

As more continuous monitoring technologies go mobile, they give both medical professionals and patients the tools needed to truly make preventive care a reality. Bringing laboratory diagnostics to the wrist is already starting to transform patient monitoring and healthcare delivery. That alone is a major incentive for traditional medtech device-makers to get aboard — or risk getting left behind.

In addition to increasing our collective understanding of health conditions, the non-invasive, continuous measurement of an extensive range of biomarkers could also deliver on the promise of personalized medicine. For years, the medical field has talked about delivering effective drug therapies based on a patient’s individual needs and providing safer, cheaper, and more effective treatments because they’re fine-tuned to each person’s unique genetic makeup.

Today, that reality is closer than ever. For example, if you’re on medication for high blood pressure, your dose could potentially change monthly, weekly, or even hourly, depending on what your body is doing. Continuous, non-invasive monitoring could alert you that your blood pressure is spiking, and that you may need more medication — or that it’s at a normal level and you require less medication. This ability to receive real-time feedback about our health status could empower a more personalized approach to managing our health.

Continuous health monitoring is the next evolution for medical device manufacturers and the whole healthcare industry. The delivery of real-time insights about various health conditions could have a transformative impact on personal health and well-being — from day-to-day health management to the early detection of multiple disease states. These new capabilities will not only provide several benefits for improving people’s health. They will also create new opportunities for healthcare providers to improve their services and reduce costs, for manufacturers to expand their products offerings, and for insurance companies to realize massive savings by encouraging people to adopt these technologies, potentially avoiding large hospital bills.

To get there, we need robust biosensing platforms that enable device manufacturers to integrate more comprehensive biomarker measurements in a wider variety of wearable and mobile products. The companies that get it right will be the ones that revolutionize the way we manage our health and well-being for decades to come.

   

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