From high speed internet to connected devices, innovation is transforming almost every aspect of our lives. The field of medicine is no different. U.K.-based health care business Babylon Health, for instance, is combining digital technology with human doctors.
The company has grand ambitions. "If we can make health care accessible, affordable, put it in the hands of every human being on earth, if we can do with health what Google did with information, that's a phenomenal thing to have achieved," Ali Parsa, Babylon Health's founder and CEO, told CNBC's Nadine Dereza.
Parsa went on to stress just how much things were changing in the field of medicine.
"Everything we know about intervention in medicine is being reinvented, whether it is electro biology or synthetic biology, whether it is laser manipulation or audiology intervention, whether it is organ reconstruction or DNA reengineering," he said. "We are reinventing the way we can intervene in your body in a way that we could never imagine before."
Babylon Health is not the only organisation looking to use technology to transform the way patients are treated.
"We want to work hard to more quickly diagnose our patients so we can begin treatment, and more quickly diagnosing requires artificial intelligence," Kevin Mahoney, senior vice president and chief administrative officer for the University of Pennsylvania Health System, said.
"It's going to require using big data," he added. "It's going to require looking for those patterns that we don't quite see, but always following it back through the physician who's been trained how to interpret that data."
The issue of whether we will eventually be treated by computers rather than humans is an intriguing one, but Mahoney sought to paint a more collaborative future.
"I'm not advocating that we're ever going to get to the point where the computer treats you," he said.
"But the amount of information that doctors are being told on a daily basis about new treatments, new evidence that's out there, artificial intelligence is going to be required to help condense that down and bring it directly to the patient's room so the doctor can intervene as effectively as possible."
