Institute For The Future

Open Medicine and the Future of Patient Engagement

Health Horizons was a media partner for the 2014 Personalized Medicine World Conference here in Silicon Valley, on January 27-28. Leading up to the conference we spoke with some of the scheduled speakers to preview their talks.

A Conversation with Dr. Kogelnik

Dr. Kogelnik’s experience across the spectrum of the healthcare industry—from clinician, to researcher, to consultant—provided the insight to create OMI, an organization dedicated connecting genomic research and patient engagement models to create a new method of providing treatment for diseases.  Genomic driven patient care is at the core of Dr. Kogelnik efforts at OMI, this treatment model uses building a new understanding of disease. This model of treatment leverages our understanding of genomic predispositions to disease and technologies’ ability to create proactive patient engagement. Genomic level medicine leverages genetics to treat the root cause of disease, treating the genes themselves. Dr. Kogelnik believes that genomic level treatments change the paradigm of how we think about treatment: 

“For the first time in the genomic era we will be able to understand what the problem is, and to add to that we know how to address the problem.”

He calls our legacy healthcare system into question; asserting that it’s stuck in a triage model of health, a model that creates discontinuity between the symptoms of the patient and illness. Dr. Kogelnik foresees a medical system where proactive patient engagement is promoted, and there is a fluid interchange between treatment and research, creating an ecosystem of transparent innovation.

Health Horizon’s 2012 map, Information Ecosystems for Well-being, included a forecast about the intersection of personalized data and patent engagement, called “programmable self-care.” It depicts a future where interventions are curated by the patient, around their own needs. This view, alongside Dr. Kogelnik’s genomic patient-driven vision radically changes our understanding of what healthcare can be. Connecting the challenge of treating disease to the fabric of our burgeoning technology era signals the deeper change that the healthcare industry must undergo: when and how the medical system treats people. The current system does not have a direct input for everyday wellness and health information, Dr. Kogelnik sees this as something that must change.

Dr. Kogelnik is rooting for a medical system that is more patient driven. But are we ready as patients? The challenge might be that we will all have to be a more engaged patients, doctors, and researchers. It might be that we all have to learn how to share health information and ask the deeper questions about how we create our health.