By: Dhiren Patel

As someone born with a rare heart defect, pulmonary atresia a condition which requires three open heart surgeries to treat as well as having had a stroke at the age of four. I recognize how important healthcare innovation has been in playing a role in giving me a chance at a normal life. To put that in perspective about 1 in every 10,000 babies is born with this defect and I am one of them.

I also have a younger cousin who shares this condition with me and if you consider the odds, it’s pretty crazy! So you see, just from that alone, I have more than enough motivation to care about the future of healthcare.

My Mom

Now, this is where it gets a bit tricky! The human mind is something we do not fully grasp and I shared this in my post about Mental Health Awareness. Having said that, my mother has schizophrenia, depression, and diabetes.

Every day I am faced with this helplessness in my inability to help my mother and this motivates me, even more, to learn about healthcare and how we can make sure that we are constantly improving as well as what tools are available to help improve healthcare today.

Mental healthcare has sorely lacked behind in innovation. Genetics and technology can play a huge part in this.

Technology

We have a problem in America, our healthcare innovation is lagging behind the increasing number of problems we are being faced with and we have the most expensive and least efficient healthcare system in the world!

Technology and data can play a huge part in this, as I have mentioned before we have the technology to order food on our phones, email, view data. Health Care has to take advantage of this progress to play an important role in providing the best care possible. Here are some basic tools and ideas of how this can be done as well as the challenges faced in implementing those ideas.

Through my personal experience, I have seen first hand the lack of tech innovation in healthcare as well as understanding about mental well-being. I have been extremely fortunate to have amazing support and some of the best doctors in the world from Dr. Barry Baylen at Torrance UCLA for Pediatric Cardiology to Dr. Jamil Aboulhosn at Ronald Reagan UCLA for adult cardiology who truly care about their patients as well as UCI Medical Center who treated me when I suffered a stroke. I would like to personally thank them for getting me this far!

I am a living embodiment of what health care innovation can accomplish and I know there are many people looking to push the boundaries of what we can accomplish. So, let’s do our part to make healthcare better so that moving forward my cousin and people like my mother have the best healthcare possible.

This post was also featured on – UCLA Health