Consumers having more influence on innovative healthcare advancement, experts say in a Nanjing summit

During the China-US Precision Medicine Initiatives Summit and the opening event of the National Health & Medical Big Data Exhibition Center in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on Sunday, George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and professor of health sciences and technology at Harvard and MIT and founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, joined the scientific advisory board of CloudHealth Medical Group, a company in China focused on healthcare management, to advise on the strategic development of their "pan-omics" direct to consumer platform.

Church has been aware that consumers become more empowered to manage their health than ever before.

"I see more consumers, both healthy and non-healthy people, playing a more proactive role in taking ownership of their own health these days as more information is available at their fingertips and their demand for extremely personalized products based on their genomic and phenotypic data increases," said Baojun Gao, chairman of CloudHealth Medical Group.

"We are integrating our real estate and retail experience combined with personal 'pan-omics' data to redefine the way we engage with our consumers in terms of increased touch points with improved health outcomes," she added.

As advances in technology evolve, they are increasingly being adopted into medical device and diagnostic products, and integrated into other business verticals involving nutrition, fitness and the like.

"The patient experience is now starting to influence the development of innovative healthcare-related methodologies, products and services that can ultimately lead to better outcomes," said Church. "I look forward to seeing the incorporation of the latest disruptive technologies into the evolving consumer-centric models of healthcare."

"I have been in the retail space for many decades and I see consumers are relying more on advertising, the internet and a variety of social media platforms to seek information or answers before seeing a doctor," said Dickson Setzo, executive director of CloudHealth Medical Group.

"We are adapting to a paradigm in which consumers are having more influence and control over the products used in their care, but we would like to empower them by making their data more interactive."