On the economic front, 2020 will see a implosion of the "healthcare bubble". By the middle of the next decade, most Western nations will be in a panic over he increasing cost of providing medical care to their aging populations. But at the same time, genetic engineering, nano machines and improving CPU power will be working from the other directions, making diagnosis, prevention and treatment easier and cheaper. 2020 will be the year that healthcare costs actually level off as increased understanding of the human genome and a program called "Google Doctor" will create "predictive medicine", which will allow for the prevention of most serious and chronic illnesses through gene therapy and other extremely early interventions.
Today, Tyler Cowan tells us about a new service that starts to bring "predictive medicine" into being:
In Hawaii, Kaiser Permanente has started a pilot project that churn through its database of patient data to predict which patients might need which tests - and then sends individuals email alerts suggesting they come in for a test or checkup. It's the same sort of technology that Netflix uses to recommend movies. And the Cleveland Clinic has teamed up with Microsoft to bring self-monitoring tools to patients managing chronic diseases, successfully engaging them in better health behaviors without expensive visits to the hospital.
