Roberto Ascione - The Future of Health: How Digital Technology Will Make Care Accessible, Sustainable, and Human

1. Chapter 13

ROBERTO ASCIONE

Copyright 2022 by Ulrico Hoepli Editore P.s.A., Milano 2018. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ascione, Roberto, author.

Title: The future of health: how digital technology will make care accessible, sustainable, and human / Roberto Ascione.

Other titles: Futuro della salute. English

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022] | Translation of Il futuro della salute / Roberto Ascione. Milano : Ulrico Hoepli editore, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021034635 (print) | LCCN 2021034636 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119797258 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119797326 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119797319 (ePub)

Subjects: MESH: Medical Informatics | Digital Technology | Delivery of Health Caretrends | Biomedical Technologytrends | United States | Europe

Classification: LCC R855.3 (print) | LCC R855.3 (ebook) | NLM W 26.5 | DDC 610.285dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021034635

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021034636

Cover image: Alfredo De Simone, Creative Director at Healthware Group
Cover design: Wiley

To my father, doctor for the people and maestro for life

I have been involved in medicine and digital technologies for over 25 years.

I trained as a doctor but never became one because I was also passionate about computer science and torn between these two elements: programming and medicine. I realized that everything in health care was largely analog, and still is in many ways. I started writing my own software using MIT's Logo programming language in middle school, and ever since I had been fascinated by the idea that, using computer science, you could write software to manage practically any problem. It was an intuition that time has confirmed!

I started to realize that health care and computer science had something in common: code! Both DNA and software programming languages were code, so I had the idea to combine these two passions of mine and to deal with digital technology and medicine. I realized very early on that there was no existing role for this, and I didn't know of a single company considering this dual discipline. Everyone advised me against entering this nonexistent field, but by the time I was almost a doctor, I decided to follow my instincts and founded a company called Healthware, so named because it was at the intersection of health care and software. The initial idea was very simple: to create software for medicine by providing better treatment tools for doctors, which resulted in better treatment for patients.

What was my motivation?

If I had been a doctor, even a very good one, I would have had a limited impact on a few thousand people. By producing software for the health-care world, the impact could be much greater. Healthware was born of this idea. It started to grow quite rapidly during the first yearsand we are still here talking about it 25 years later.

Healthware was founded in southern Italy and is now present in various parts of the world. However, we are not here to talk about Healthware, but rather about what we help to cultivate: the development of digital health to improve lives.

Let's start with a few concepts that may certainly seem obvious, but are not as simple as they appear.

Digital technology is ubiquitous, and many aspects of our individual lives are already largely linked to digital platforms for service, communication, or social sharing. These dimensions of daily life are now totally linked to these systems and technologies, which has effects on an entire series of processes: economic, productive, psychological, behavioral, and much more. This phenomenon has also occurred in the health sector, where it has obviously changed a lot of things over the past few years. We have become accustomed to enjoying certain platform services that have profoundly transformed various sectors, from the hotel industry to the music industry. We have also become both producers and consumers at the same time. Let's think about music: not only is it no longer bought and sold as it was before, but because of the way it is consumed, it is no longer produced in the same way. Musicians don't create albums with two hits and a B-side anymore. (Remember long-playing albums with 10-songs?). Now consumers buy one song at a time, so artists must produce 10 good songs if they want ten hits. As these patterns permeate various industries, they change them dramatically. All this combined is not just a marginal change, but a radical transformation of health that has an even greater scope than that of music or travel.