The following is a guest article by Josh Miller, Co-Founder & CEO at Gradient Health.
As a global society, we have never spent more on healthcare. We have never been more informed. We’ve never been more advanced. Yet there is a great divide between what we have accomplished scientifically, and what patients actually get access to.
This is not something spoken about a lot, because the focus is of course on developing life-saving medical devices and diagnostics. However, despite new innovations being created, funded, and announced every week, the speed with which these new technologies are being adopted is slow if they are adopted at all.
Why is This Important?
People’s health cannot wait. People with potentially life-threatening conditions need immediate access to the best care. People suffering from chronic, debilitating diseases cannot wait another year for a device that makes them able to live their lives with dignity.
On the other hand, with healthcare, unlike in other areas of technological innovation, we cannot just “move fast and break things”. For good reason, there is a rigorous development process that must be undertaken before anything used within a clinical setting can be made available to the public. This includes testing and validating the technology and complying with all the necessary regulatory requirements.
After this, there is still a plethora of time-consuming work needed to get innovation into healthcare systems, where it can ultimately help real people.
There is no simple fix to the complexity of innovation in healthcare. However, we are now entering an era of maturity in this space with more options for innovators to safely get to patients faster, enabling the delivery of better healthcare.
What Slows Down Better Healthcare?
Clinical Validation – Ensuring and Proving that your Innovation Works
There is no shortcut for proper research and validation work. But there are ways to make the entire process go faster. Specifically, the time taken to source the data needed to train, test, and validate algorithms to be used within healthcare technology.
When developing novel AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms for clinical use, it is paramount to be able to have good quality data to test whether it works as intended, for the people you want to help. This is the key to overcoming bias in medical AI and to ensuring that innovations increase equality in healthcare rather than exacerbate them. However, sourcing data is often a lengthy process of engaging with many different institutions and comes with a risk of inadvertently accessing sensitive patient information.
What Can Innovators Do?
Over recent years, the methods that AI developers can use to expedite data access have grown exponentially. From data intermediaries and partners, to federated learning and synthetic data, there are a host of smart approaches to the problem. There are several things innovators can do, when it comes to data sourcing, that will help them get to market faster and therefore help patients quicker.
Firstly, identify exactly the datasets needed for your work, is it a specific disease etiology, a certain manufacturer’s CT (Computed Tomography) scans, or perhaps a specific regional dataset that you are currently missing? Once you have this information, you can begin narrowing down your options of data sourcing methods.
Secondly, you should look for a method that enables faster, more streamlined engagement with large institutions that hold a wealth of data. This could be a partner or intermediary that already holds a relationship with that institution.
Thirdly, consider how you will access the datasets once they have been made available to you. To be valid for regulatory submissions, the data will need to be handled appropriately and anonymized. When considering different methods, ensure that the data has been responsibly sourced, and is going to be fully anonymized before it reaches you.
Ultimately, technology will need to play a key role in improving human health, but we are still a long way off seeing its true potential. For patients to benefit from the increased rate of innovation, one step that needs to be overcome is access to reliable data, and we just might be on the verge of this milestone.
About Josh Miller
Josh Miller is CEO & Co-Founder of Gradient Health. He holds a BS/BSE in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Duke University. He has spent his career building companies, first founding FarmShots, a Y Combinator backed startup that grew to an international presence and was acquired by Syngenta in 2018. He then went on to serve on the board of several companies, making angel investments in over 10 companies across envirotech, medicine, and fintech.
About Gradient Health
Gradient Health is a medical technology company headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. They provide instant access to the raw and labeled medical images needed to train and validate technologies, getting more equitable innovations to market, faster. Gradient was founded to power better medical research by accelerating AI development.
Health innovators from around the world use Gradient Health’s platform to improve their products, without compromising speed, quality of research or data privacy.
