The following is an excerpt from the Mayo Clinic Press book Future Care by Jag Singh, M.D.
Foreward By Siddhartha Mukherjee
Future Care will most certainly serve as a template for the way medical care will evolve in the coming years. I have known Jag Singh for over two decades. We both started our journey in medicine in India and completed our doctorates at Oxford (at different times); we overlapped in our training at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Jag is a doctor’s doctor, a consummate clinician, tangential thinker, futurist, and scientist striving to improve the delivery of care through his research in device technologies and electrical therapies for cardiac disorders. As the former clinical lead for one of the largest cardiology divisions in the country, Jag understands the travails and tribulations of the health care system. In Future Care, he brings together the different evolving facets of digital health and the story of how they might interface and make health care sustainable.
Health care, as we all know, is in a state of transition. Its digital transformation using sensors and artificial intelligence will change the way we deliver and receive care. Future Care sits at the epicenter of public discourse about this transition. The soul of this book is centered on improving lives through forecasting and averting disease by providing well-timed interventions. Jag delivers this message with a unique simplicity and clarity, illustrated by his own personal encounters with disease and the patients in his care. The book is vibrantly punctuated with real-life clinical situations, with scores of stories, anecdotes, and characters. I was particularly struck by Victoria’s story (her seven family members are dying of cancer, and she seeks an understanding of how to care for them) and by Maya, a 38-year-old woman losing her battle with pancreatic cancer and struggling to come to terms with her mortality. These narratives highlight several areas where transformative technologies— including artificial intelligence to aid in the early detection, or guide the treatment, of cancer—can help save lives. The memorable story of Laura and her failing heart and devastating collapse emphasizes how much angst could so easily be prevented through the remote monitoring of sensor data.
The burgeoning digital metamorphosis in medicine provides us an opportunity to scale personalized care globally. To that end, this book highlights new models of care and provides a vision for what the hospital of the future might look like. Importantly, none of this seems dystopian. Jag has very comprehensively outlined the need for modular medicine, disease management models, and third-party vendors, while postulating the evolution of the classic academic medical center. Some of this digital transformation is already here; it has just not yet found its way into clinical practice. We have a unique opportunity to understand and embrace this new world of sensors and artificial intelligence— and adapt it to our lives.
Future Care will have a significant impact on how medicine continues to evolve. It will serve as a terrific guide for patients, caregivers, and anyone interested in health care as it provides direction for the future.
Relevant reading
Future Care
A renowned cardiologist and Harvard professor spells out the future digital shift of medicine — and how it will impact the lives not only of patients and health care professionals but of all humans.
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