#6

Session 6 came around with the topic: BioBusiness Revolution: Healthcare and Biomedical Sciences (Past, Present and Future). Through reading a couple of my peers' blogs, it seems like this topic is not appealing to many, but on the contrary it is something that piqued my interest.
Maybe at first sight I thought that there's nothing particularly outstanding about the topic, but after going through some of the readings and the class, I found that I enjoyed dealing with this topic!
Perhaps it's due to the fact that there are so many possibilities that we have yet to capture for both healthcare and biomedical sciences.

For this lesson, Prof was late due to the rain, haha. In the meantime we were shown a two-part video on 'Emergence of and Innovations in Disease Management', which I had already seen actually, but no harm refreshing my memory!
I thought it was interesting how there was a little irony in how improved healthcare has helped people to live longer, yet it only means more chronic diseases (that come with age), and this in turn only leads to more problems of lacking resources in providing long-term healthcare and the issue of an aging population.
The solution in this is of course disease management. This involves careful analysis of patients at various forms of risk and allocating resources better. With new ways to monitor and motivate patients through surveillance through technology, the doctors have more time on their hands to deal with issues that cannot be done in any other ways than personally. Such an example would be equipments at home that are able to remind patients to take their medicine, record data and compute symptoms as reported by patients to identify what could possibly be wrong. Of course as with any forms of technology, this also comes with risks that it might fail, and in the context of healthcare, we can hardly afford to mess up.
Therefore when it comes to healthcare dealing with chronic diseases, the matter is likely to be open for debate.

However, we can devote these forms of healthcare towards more minor issues. This is related to what Yu Jun (Ethan) presented in this session, on mobile healthcare. For minor illnesses like flu or an injury, patients can easily contact their doctors through their phones and have the doctors advise them on what to do through a video call and interactive pictures/instructions. In this way healthcare can be much more efficient for all.

One problem that could arise from this would be the effects on the workforce in the healthcare industry. For example, in the article on disruptive change in healthcare, it mentioned that it radiologists are threatened when researches come up with a technology that could do the radiologists' jobs easily. Harsh as this may sound, I don't think this should be a factor holding us back from being more open to disruptive changes, because we wouldn't be able to advance if we weren't open to change. Technology has been snatching away jobs for a long time (back to days where people did the jobs that technology in factories now do), but it has also been creating jobs.

The presenters for this session had interesting topics. The topics on human immortality and genetic discrimination are the ones most interesting to me. It's rather amazing to think what possibilities technology and bio science can bring to us, and the controversy of whether it is good or just destructive.
In my opinion, I wouldn't want to live forever, nor would I want to find out how long I have to live or have people know how long I have to live and be discriminated based on that. Yet, in this class, there were plenty of others who want to do either or both. Once again it boils down to personal opinion. Regardless of whether you want to do it or not, you can't deny that technology such as those are indeed impressive.

Overall, I felt that this session was interesting and provided me with a lot of insights. I would rae this session a 9.5.