Photo Credit: NikkiZalewski

In the Physician’s Weekly (PW) podcast‘s first episode of 2024, host Rachel Giles, MD, and PW editorial board member Alex McDonald, MD, discussed their perspectives on anticipated medical breakthroughs they felt could shape the future of healthcare in 2024.

Now that we are halfway through the year, have their predictions held up?

1. Primary prevention: For Dr. McDonald, primary prevention is the throughline for 2024’s innovations. “Things like the poly pill, I think, we’ll see a lot more work there [primary prevention].”
2. AI-powered diagnostics and patient information: “2023 was probably the year that AI exploded, and it will likely continue to explode across all sectors you could imagine. Healthcare is no different. I don’t think AI will replace the human physician-patient interaction, but I think it will help us do our jobs better because there’s so much information and so much knowledge that one person can’t know it all. It’s going to help us make better decisions at the point of care and long-term prognosis,” said Dr. McDonald.
3. Inflation Reduction Act: “The Inflation Reduction Act will help change some out-of-pocket copay expenses. So once patients meet their deductible, they’re not going to have that sort of 5% cost for some of those medications, which can be exorbitant. And so that’s going to be a big thing, especially Medicare beneficiaries who won’t have as much out-of-pocket costs for some of their medications,” explained Dr. McDonald.
4. R21 Malaria Vaccine: “It’s been showing to be incredibly effective in children in Africa, and there have been thousands of children who have been vaccinated at this point, and it’s showing incredible promise for long-term protection against malaria,” said Dr. Giles.
5. Digital Twins (digital decision support): “Theoretical models about what might happen if you have [blank disease], you’re at a decision point, and you can choose A or choose B. These computerized models help us decide the outcome of path A versus path B and further decision points down each of those paths. So, I feel like you can take a very complicated situation and almost have predictive analytics of all these different pathways based on which decision you make at which point,” explained Dr. McDonald.
6. T-cell vaccine for HIV/AIDS: “The proof-of-concept trial has been impressive. We’re looking forward to seeing how they scale this up and distribute it, but it’s available in limited situations and sites now. I think we’ll see more real-world evidence coming out of that,” said Dr. Giles.
7. Improve virtual and home care hospitalization: “We know patients do better at home, recover better at home, and are more comfortable at home. And so, if they’re clinically stable, we can get them IV medications at home. We can treat them virtually. We can have a virtual visit, you can have some remote monitoring, talk about wearable technology, or talk about patient-centered rather than taking the patient and putting them into the hospital where all the doctors are. We can have the doctors and the medicine come to the patient. I love this sort of paradigm shift from where we were 150 years ago before hospitals; we’re shifting back because we realized that the centralization of hospitals is maybe not always the best thing, quite frankly, when it comes to infectious disease spread and patients not doing as well,” said Dr. McDonald
8. Tissue printing: “3D, tissue printing, and I specifically mention The Kidney Project, which is a UCSF project. There are significant proof of concept trials planned for next year, and I think we will see some interesting data come out on this,” said Dr. Giles. “There’s such a need for organ transplants, and we know that list is so long and if we can grow our own artificial organs, and I feel like this is something super sci-fi and futuristic, but it’s becoming a reality, which is pretty amazing,” agreed Dr. McDonald.
9. Medical alert systems for seniors: “There have been some improvements where you don’t have to wear this huge necklace kind of thing. They’ve gotten a lot better this year, and I think it’s more acceptable for people to use them,” said Dr. Giles.
10. Genome screening for newborns: “The BabySeq Project is a Harvard Medical School-based project,” explained Dr. Giles. “It raises all kinds of ethical questions, which is probably the biggest thing. I know we do some genetic testing in utero before the baby’s born,” said Dr. McDonald. “At birth or within, I think, three days of birth, when they do the standard heal blood test to see for the basic metabolic diseases or whatever they did at that point, they did full genome screening. It’s a quarter of a million babies at this point. And the idea is to build it up so that we’ve got enough to know about what’s going for primary prevention,” explained Dr. Giles. “But then again, the question for any test is, how does it change the treatment plan? That’s something that I’m always thinking about as a primary care doctor. We can order all these tests, but what does it mean to that individual patient? What does it change?” questioned Dr. McDonald.