“The fourth industrial age is here,” says Daniel Kraft, a health care futurist and medical doctor. “It’s transforming how we get our digital banking done, how we stream movies. But health care is still stuck in the third–or maybe the second–industrial age, with fax machines and CD-ROMs.”
Specifically, innovations such as artificial intelligence and machine learning have been stubbornly slow to enter the health sector. And the big strides that have been made in data collection–wearables that monitor your vitals, voice biomarker trackers, and genomic sequencing, to name just a few–have so far resulted in only a few widely used, truly useful applications.
“Nobody wants more data–they want the actual insights that are useable,” says Kraft, who prefers the term now-ist to futurist. “How do we make actionable information that translates to the point of care or the bedside?”
Dispatches From The Front 