Until a few years ago, people queued at the bank, booked their holidays off brochures, paid their bills in cash, bought their music on CDs and waited in line at outpatient departments to see a doctor.

Fast forward to today. People bank and book holidays online, use Revolut and PayPal to settle bills, and Spotify their music.

Yet, they still wait in line at outpatient departments to see a doctor.

The question practically asks itself. Why hasn’t the ‘consumer revolution’ reached the healthcare doorstep?

Is healthcare destined to keep following protocols and procedures devised half a century ago or more? 

The general and safe answer comes with equal ease – healthcare is so much more complex than buying music, paying bills or booking a holiday. Only a human can take care of another human’s health, runs the argument.

Really? I think the time has come to question such a facile answer and to dig deeper. The rate of change in the world, driven by game-changing technological innovations, opens up too many new doors to ignore their benefits to the most important thing to humans – their health.

The opportunities, and admittedly the challenges, to bring healthcare up to exponential technological speed are there for us to explore.

Soon, clients in Malta will be able to subscribe to a Remote Patient Monitoring system, through which wellness and good health are monitored 24/7

There are three factors which make this time, our time, the right one for change in this direction in healthcare.

First, millennials are the one-click, digital generation. Queues are not in their vocabulary. Neither is time wasted getting most things done physically. The world, their world, is the one at their fingertips as they snake them around the virtual keyboard of a smartphone.  This is a generation that is instinctively, culturally and socially ready to make the key switch – to track, care for and manage one’s own health as much as possible. 

Secondly, having detailed and specific information about your body being monitored, stored and managed on a smartphone takes self-care to a completely new level. We can project a scenario in which your electronic patient records would be directly accessible on your smartwatch or mobile. And the data will be available to you in real-time.

Your health will be within your grasp like never before in history. You won’t become a doctor, but your smartphone will be able to tell him or her exactly what is happening to you.

Thirdly, there is artificial intelligence which is opening up a whole new ball game in healthcare. With devices that can collate and dissect data instantly and ‘think’ about it, AI is revolutionising the fundamentals of how healthcare is monitored, diagnosis carried out, medicines dispensed and follow-ups made.

On this count, the prospects and opportunities appear to be so vast, and until recently inconceivable, that the sky is the limit.

This is not some futuristic sci-fi pipe dream. It is the reality unfolding before us today, and how the health service will work in the (not too distant) future.

Soon, clients in Malta will be able to subscribe to a Remote Patient Monitoring system, through which wellness and good health are monitored 24/7. AI will monitor and alert first the client and then the healthcare worker in case of (increasingly serious) deviations from the normal pattern.

It will be insulin-dependent diabetics who will first benefit from this system. Others will follow soon after.

This transition will be pivotal to shift the philosophy from healthcare as “sick-care” to healthcare as, well, healthcare – that is, to prevent sickness. 

These changes will completely alter the clients’ as well as the medical staff’s journey through the healthcare system. Clients will no longer have to languish in long queues for routine matters.

Concomitantly, medical staff will have their time freed up so as to concentrate more on the needs of critically ill patients.

Today we are slowly getting used to the notion of self-driving cars, which was unthinkable just a few years ago. In parallel, technology and innovation are now providing us with the opportunity to take this message to the healthcare sector.

The era of empowering self-caring is about to dawn, changing forever the way we protect and augment our health as well as the way we detect a health problem and how best to deal with it.

Exciting times indeed.

Chris Fearne is the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Health.