Prevention vs. Treatment

In the process of researching the Accenture project in my last post, I ran across an IBM project for remote patient-health monitoring.

What struck me was its focus on treatment and management rather than prevention. There’s a simple explanation: this project focuses on treatment and management, and therefore the article is going to present evidence to bolster that position. However, I suspect that treatment and management are the focus also because those areas enable the easiest, most obvious, most direct use of technology.

In 2003, the United States alone spent $1.7 trillion on health care, with more than 75 percent of these costs directed toward the treatment of patients with chronic diseases. Chronic diseases—which include diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cancer—are persistent or recurring conditions that require care for more than a year and that limit the patient’s activities. Although there is no cure for a chronic disease, it can be managed to minimize its effects on the patient.

This might be the result of a particular myopia related to business in general: if you need hard numbers to make decisions, then clearly it’s easier to work off the present reality than project into the future and predict those numbers.

It’s easiest to think of technology in the context of problem-solving applications. The critical question, however, is: what is the problem? Do you look at diabetes as the problem? Or do you go upstream and look at the conditions that contribute to diabetes as the problem?

As a designer, I find the latter problem more interesting. Obviously it’s a much riskier approach than working within the existing known economic space…that $1.7 trillion is an awfully tempting number! Prevention might be worth more than that, but it could also be worth much less than that (healthy people don’t need lots of drugs or medical treatment, nor do they need the health and medical industries to support them).

Of course money isn’t all that’s at stake. Quality of life is also a big deal, and I’m sure the government would prefer to have a healthy population as opposed to a sickly one. The question is whose vision of the future is going to win out? The vision where we’re all sick and need constant care and treatment? Or the future where we’re healthy and proactive about our health and lifestyles?

More to the point, what’s it going to take to change the way business approaches health?