The 4th Industrial Revolution and its Impact on Health

As mentioned earlier, innovation does not happen in a vacuum and therefore it is important to understand the context in which you innovate. This also allows you to draw on some of the affordances to innovate and we are currently in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Definition of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

According to the World Economic Forum (2023), “the Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental change in the way we live, work and relate to one another. It is a new chapter in human development, enabled by extraordinary technological advances. These advances are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril. This revolution's speed, breadth, and depth is forcing us to rethink how countries develop, how organisations create value, and even what it means to be human. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about more than just technology-driven change; it is an opportunity to help everyone, including leaders, policy-makers, and people from all income groups and nations, to harness converging technologies in order to create an inclusive, human-centered future. The real opportunity is to look beyond technology and find ways to give the greatest number of people the ability to impact their families, organisations, and communities positively.”

The 4th IR makes what was once clearly distinguishable, indistinguishable (e.g. human and machine). The first ID was based on the discovery of using steam engines to power things. This was followed by industrial revolutions inspired by electricity, and computers and communications technologies. We are now in the early stages of the 4th industrial revolution which brings together physical, digital, and biological systems. “It does not necessarily affect what we are doing but it changes who we are”. It restructures ourselves in relation to life, the planet and work.

Impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the Health Sector: A Qualitative Study

The health sector is impacted by digitisation, which changes the way healthcare is delivered, such as the changing interactions between patients and caregivers, and government and stakeholders. There are innovations in methods of treatment, diagnosis, and monitoring of patient's health status. Innovations in the management and organisation of health facilities and health systems are being developed, and access to healthcare is also being modified. This article examines the perceptions of health experts and professionals about how the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR) will impact the health sector based on base technologies in the definition of FIR (such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and data science).

These experts and professionals identified improved proximity between the patients and the service provider, a shift in focus from disease to prevention, and the implementation of disruptive technologies to identify risk situations earlier, leading to faster interventions, as patients and their biodata will be more closely connected to the internet. "Therefore, more important than data collection is the possibility of processing them in real time and screening them by algorithms. This connection to patients by the Internet of Things (IoT) will enable early diagnosis, health/disease monitoring, precision medicine, and medical history intelligence". Mobile technology will increase the number of people ‘covered by’ diagnostic, treatment, and follow-up interventions, improving access to healthcare. Disruptive technology also has the ability to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare through precision medicine that individualizes treatment and reduces misdiagnosis. This is all dependent on producing and applying large amounts of biodata, analysing for patterns and the promotion of early medical interventions.

The FIR will necessitate changes in the role and actions of the government. The consensus was that the government would have to have a determining role in creating various incentives to adopt FIR innovations, adopt a systems thinking approach, and transformation of governance models to seize opportunities and diminish threats in the health systems that would act as barriers to incorporating technology. Governments should also facilitate startups and means to integrate them into the health sector through the development of research and innovation hubs and easy funding. Government should also incentivise the training and retraining of health professionals for new technologies and the iterative evolution and interactions of these technologies. Governments have to be prepared for the simultaneous evolution of health professionals and health systems. Finally, the government should implement legislation that promotes the protection of user data and step up its role in providing universal healthcare coverage.

Information exchange that enables health facilities to be more autonomous and the digital nature of health technologies increases the financial sustainability of health systems.

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