Understanding the role of diagnostics and observation

The Mayo Clinic in the United States is perceived to be a lighthouse in modern healthcare, although the clinic was already founded back in the late 19th century. The American-based clinic puts tremendous effort into getting diagnostics right from the very first moment, for a lot of different reasons.

In the book Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic, founder Dr. William Mayo (1895) says: Above all things let me urge upon you the absolute necessity of careful examinations for the purpose of diagnosis. My own experience has been that the public will forgive you an error in treatment more readily than one in diagnosis, and I fully believe that more than one-half of the failures in diagnosis are due to hasty or unmethodical examinations.

Dr. Mayo figured out that an inaccurate or even wrong diagnosis would cause serious further problems to a patient and the quality of care.

Diagnostics have a decisive impact on the quality of care and patient safety by highlighting the following:

• Disease prevention through early screening
• Discovery of any diseases at an early stage through the accurate diagnosis of early symptoms
• Prognosis of the course of the disease, including determining the effectiveness of treatments and medications such as antibiotics
• Decisions on follow-up treatments and monitoring the long-term effectiveness of those treatments

Diagnostics is aiming for improving patient care. Getting an accurate diagnosis is crucial. Getting an accurate diagnosis in a timely matter is even more crucial. Healthcare institutions are investing heavily in diagnostics. Let’s take the aforementioned Mayo Clinic as an example.

In April 2021, the clinic announced massive investments in a new platform to deliver AI-driven clinical decision support through remote monitoring. It cooperates with other companies that develop algorithms for the early detection of diseases and collect data from remote devices to support clinical decisions. These two companies – Anumana and Lucem Health – are both start-ups. This is what we will see in the future: traditional healthcare players seeking cooperation with start-ups that deliver cutting-edge technology to enhance care.

Mayo Clinic’s Platform President, Dr. John Halamka, is convinced that the upcoming technology in AI and data science will result in a breakthrough in disease detection and, with that, a better perspective for patients. However, in the statement, he added that this is not just about technology – he also stressed the importance of patient engagement and cultural changes in healthcare to make it happen (source: Healthcare IT News, April 2021).

So, diagnostics is important, but how is it driving transformation in healthcare? Getting better, faster results from diagnostics can save impactful interventions, long-term treatments, and more speedy recovery. Again, we need to keep the patient as the focus. Less impactful interventions, less need for long-term treatments, and speedy recoveries will, in the first place, benefit the patient. And, as a more than welcome side effect, it will drive the costs for healthcare down – at least that’s what economic specialists in the field expect.

With that, we are entering the field of precision diagnostics and precision medicine. A number of studies have been executed to show the cost-effectiveness of precision diagnosis and precision medicine. Precision diagnosis and precision medicine are decisive in the following ways:

• Reducing the risk of treatment by trial and error
• Reducing the risk of over-prescription
• Shortening the time before treatment is started
• Decreasing the time that a patient has to spend in hospital or care institutions

The contradiction lies in the fact that precision diagnosis and precision medicine require substantial investments. However, studies from the University of Utah (source: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical) show that these upfront investments can save expenditures in the long run when it comes to the execution of treatment. More importantly, the studies show that the quality of life of the patient is improving with accurate, precision diagnosis and precision medicine.

Going back to the previous section, we can see that people have already invested in smartwatches that observe their vital signs and give advice or alerts when needed. This observation and subsequent prefiltering allow for the early detection of possible health conditions but will also limit the influx of people for screening and diagnostics.