The Application of Preventive Medicine in the Future Digital Health Era (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED A number of seismic shifts is expected to reshape the future of medicine. The global population is rapidly aging, significantly impacting global disease burden. Medicine is undergoing a paradigm shift, defining and diagnosing diseases to earlier stages and shifting the healthcare focus from treating diseases to preventing them. The application and purview of digital medicine is expected to broaden significantly. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the shift towards predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory (P4) medicine, and identified healthcare accessibility, affordability and patient empowerment as core values in the future digital health era. This “left shift” towards preventive care is anticipated to redefine healthcare, emphasizing health promotion over disease treatment. In the future, the traditional triad of preventive medicine--primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention--will be realized with technologies such as genomics, artificial intelligence, bioengineering and wearable devices, wearables, and telemedicine. Breast cancer and diabetes serve as case studies to demonstrate how these technologies such as personalized risk assessment, AI-assisted and app-based technologies have been developed and commercialized to provide personalized preventive care. Overall, preventive medicine and the use of advanced technology will hold great potential for improving healthcare outcomes in the future.