Personalised medicine seems to be the next step in advancement. At IRIA 2020, Dr Jan Kimpen, Global Chief Medical Officer, Philips explains about the scope for personalised medicine and how radiology become and an important tool in this process in conversation with Raelene Kambli
What excites you about the transformations happening within the healthcare industry?
The world of healthcare is a changing place. At one end you have the number of chronic diseases increasing but on the other hand, you have technologies that are getting better and better by the day while opening several avenues of treatment options. Today, we have electronic medical
records, everything is connected to the cloud, everything is getting digital and all this data that is accumulated is then analysed by AI to get fantastic solutions. I think this transformation is really exciting.
We are talking about personalised medicine today. What does it really mean to patients and providers both?
Personalised medicine means that for every other individual patient, you decide the best diagnosis, the best treatment option. It is not a one size fits all thing but a real personalised care option. Now in order to make that decisions, solutions, one needs a lot of data. Big data plays a significant role in this. Take for instance, a patient needs an A kind of diagnosis or treatment. Now to make that decision, the physician needs to analyse data of patients having similar diseases, put those algorithm together and find what suits them, then come up with a diagnosis or treatment for this patient.
So what role would radiology play in personalised medicine?
Imaging is going be a cornerstone in the diagnostic domain for personalised medicine. Take cancer as an example. Diagnostic imaging has become of the major areas for detection of various kinds of cancers but to make it personalised, one has to integrate the data from the imaging equipment to the other data of the patient. Compare and analyse the data available. For example, whether the patient is young or old, understand the genetic compositions etc., with imaging being a big chunk of it, then a personalised diagnosis for a particular patient can be achieved.
So you say that radiology will play a major role in personalised medicine. Yes. See take the example of cancer diagnosis, imaging has become a very important tool in the diagnosis of various cancers.
So how is Philips working on developing technologies for personalised medicine?
Philips is investing immensely in research and development of digital tools and technologies that can help a doctor aggregate data from our imaging machines and also from our EMR (electronic medical records) and also from other electronic record systems; be it imaging laboratories, genomic systems, pathology system and more. We make it completely intra-operable so the integration is more seamless. Using this integrated solution cater to personalised care becomes easy.
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