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Clinicians will soon be assisted by data analysts in diagnosing and treating chronic as well as genetic disease and make reversing their effects a real possibility.

One of the fastest growing chronic diseases, diabetes, have had doctors at wits end to find remedies and hopefully to reverse its effects for ages. That might not have to wait much longer.

Through big data analytics, the accuracy of a person’s diagnosis can be taken a step further by examining an individual’s microbiome. Microbiome tends to change as a person develops diabetes.

By determining a specific diagnosis, the question can now go on to how do we treat it. Doctors can use that to see how a person’s microbiome is converting and tell the patient which therapy they need to treat it, maybe even reversing the diabetic process.

This new found discovery, was made a possibility through the data genomics explosion that saw additional data on genomes increasing clinicians’ opportunity to work out correlations and connections that were previously overlooked or went unnoticed.

Considering that it used to take 10 years and 50 scientists around the world to sequence the genome of an oil palm, costing billions of dollars, today running a genome sequence is less labour intensive –  costing around $1,000 and done in approximately 24 hours. Prices are expected to drop even more, making genome procedures and corrections at the gene level for the common person, a soon to be probability.

This influx of data would need the expertise of data analysts to tabulate, and make sense of, for clinicians to apply to their patients. So the role of doctors will be changing as data analytics begin to disrupt the industry.

Medical information is consistently increasing and evolving and believed to be doubling almost every year. Clinicians now have the tedious task of ingesting information 80-90 hours per-week in studies just to keep up to date with latest technologies and breakthroughs in the field.

Therefore, the role of the doctor is going to have to become more of the guide rather than the information outlet. Where people will go to gather thoughts rather than be told what is wrong. With the data that can be gathered from genomes and the hope of reversing the effects of one of man’s greatest foe, diabetes, we may see the end of chronic disease as we know it. Who knows? With a little luck, we may come to predict evolution of bacteria and viruses, putting an end to all diseases.

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