Exquisite to Distributed: A Parallel Transformation in Space and Healthcare Data Ecosystems
Historically, both space and healthcare industries used exquisite systems to collect high fidelity data that were interpreted by experts to make critical, sometimes life and death, decisions. In the case of space, large satellites with national security missions collect data on activities happening on Earth to inform critical national security decision makers.1 In the case of healthcare, imaging systems, sample collections, and analytical laboratories collect data on patients to inform diagnoses and treatments by doctors.
Such exquisite data collection will remain necessary for both industries, but both are in the midst of a data ecosystem transition, where distributed, lower fidelity, high-volume data sources have emerged and are continuing to grow in sophistication. In the case of space, the rise of small satellites and lower cost launch ushered in the new paradigm. In the case of healthcare, the rise of miniaturized and embedded sensors, advanced compute architectures, and wearable (and other remote patient monitoring) technologies ushered in the new paradigm.
Both industries will be transformed by this shifting data ecosystem, but the extent of this transformation will depend on a combination of (1) use case development, (2) adoption by end-users, (3) acceptance by experts, (4) policy and regulations, and (5) data integrity and security.
Use Case Development
For both space and healthcare, proving the usefulness of these lower fidelity data sources is essential. This means developing use cases that can achieve one of the following:
Create the same result as an exquisite system, but at a lower cost, on a quicker timeline, and/or with increased resilience.
Augment an exquisite system to increase impact for a marginal increase in cost or other resources.
Create a new use case that cannot be achieved by an exquisite system
Make a new or existing use case available to a new market via lower costs, increased volume, or other advantage unique to the new paradigm.
Achieving any of these requires discovering the end users, their needs, challenges, and biases, understanding existing exquisite systems, their capabilities, limitations, and costs, and exploring the potential use cases that existing solutions will never address.
For the space sector, this means engaging with existing space users, like governments, to understand where these new, distributed systems can replace, augment, and expand existing capabilities. But it also means engaging with potential space users that may have no idea that space technologies can solve their challenges, and may not understand or be intimidated by the complexity of the solution.
For the healthcare sector, this means leveraging these new wearables and related tools in medical research to understand their efficacy, or lack thereof, for various use cases. It means shifting perspectives on diagnoses, treatment monitoring, and patient interaction from discrete measurements to the use cases enabled by long term, time series data.
Adoption By End Users
Developing a use case is challenging, but getting a user to adopt a new solution for a given use case is an entirely separate challenge. While this challenge exists for both space and healthcare industries, the nature of it is different.
For space, there are two separate adoption challenges, as the adoption hurdles are different for existing vs new space data users. For existing space data users, organizational cultural inertia, lock-in effects, and clear demonstration of the value proposition are the biggest challenges. For new space data users, those same challenges exist, but in addition, the following challenges emerge: general awareness of the applicability of the data, education and training on the enabling systems, tailoring of products to address the users specific use case, and simplification of the products, so space expertise is not needed for adoption.
For healthcare, the adoption challenge is very different, as adoption of wearable devices is often a business-to-consumer (B2C) challenge, rather than a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-government (B2G) challenge. And wearable adoption is on the rise. One thing that makes the adoption hurdles less burdensome for these wearable technologies is that they often exist in a wrist-worn or ring form factor, which requires minimal adjustment for users, since wrist and finger worn items have been commonplace for millennia. The bigger challenge is adoption for healthcare use cases specifically, which is more an acceptance by experts, rather than a user adoption, problem.
Acceptance By Experts
Adoption by the end-user is not the only challenge, there is also a need for the new paradigm to be accepted by experts in the respective fields. The exquisite systems on which experts have relied are not disappearing, so getting such experts to accept that there is value in the distributed systems as well, is essential for the impact potential of these new paradigms to occur.
For space, there is significant overlap between existing space data end-users and experts in the field, so acceptance by experts can be accomplished through typical product and business development practices. Much of this has already occurred over the past decade in the government market. However, for experts in potential commercial markets for space data, there is still significant work to be done, as experts in those potential markets may not yet be convinced of the benefit, in part because they lack the experience with existing exquisite systems that is prevalent in the government market.
For healthcare, acceptance by experts is a major hurdle. Consumers may be adopting wearable technologies, but their use in clinical healthcare settings is still in its infancy. Wide-spread inclusion of the technology into peer reviewed medical research studies will be essential to the long-term acceptance of the technology into clinical applications by experts. Such peer-reviewed studies are the only way to fully assess the efficacy of the technology for clinical application. In the interim, I imagine some doctors are seeing some patients bring time series data regarding their health, via fitness wearables, to their appointments.
Policy and Regulations
Both space and healthcare are highly regulated industries, and thus, policy and regulations will play an important role in facilitating or hampering the potential impacts of a shifting data ecosystem.
For space, the regulatory environment is currently evolving in terms of both easing regulations and introduction of new regulations. Historically, both the collection and transport of space data by U.S. companies has been highly regulated, constraining the possible use cases of the data and underlying technology. However, those regulations have been updated and streamlined to better facilitate the rise of distributed space data systems. That said, the rise of distributed space data systems has also introduced complexity in space traffic management, and new regulations to address this complexity are being proposed.
For healthcare, the regulatory environment creates a divide between the rapid adoption of wearables by consumers and their use in a healthcare setting. In the U.S., approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is typically required for use of such devices for medical applications. However, even with FDA approval, there is still a key question of how the cost of such devices and their use will be covered, so buy-in from health insurance companies will also be needed for widespread acceptance and adoption of this new paradigm.
Data Integrity and Security
Two important elements for both the adoption and regulatory compliance of these emerging distributed data ecosystems are the integrity and security of the data. While these distributed data systems may be lower fidelity than existing exquisite systems, data integrity and security are still paramount.
For both space and healthcare, data integrity is essential, because if the data cannot be trusted, then the data should not be used for decision making. While part of data integrity is ensuring the efficacy of the measurement being made, it also requires security of the data to ensure it is not altered by bad actors. As previously mentioned, existing exquisite systems in both domains have been used to make life and death decisions. If these emerging distributed systems are to play a role in such decisions, then trust via integrity and security must be prioritized.
Relatedly, both space and healthcare have levels of data security that must be properly managed to fully leverage the value of emerging distributed data systems. For space, there are both classified and unclassified sources of space data for national security applications. For healthcare, HIPAA laws protect healthcare data, but currently most wearable data is not protected by HIPAA. In both cases, these tiers of data protection are essential to ensure the usability of the data across both high security and low security applications. However, there are also applications where the merging of highly secure with less secure data is needed for the highest fidelity decision making. Thus, as the space and healthcare data ecosystems continue to evolve, ensuring both the stratification of data and ability to merge data types will allow both data ecosystems to reach their full potential.
Concluding Remarks
While the space and healthcare industries are wildly different, some aspects of their evolving data ecosystems are similar. These parallels may enable the two industries to learn from one another, in terms of both best practices and lessons learned, across use case development, end-user adoption, acceptance by experts, regulatory approaches, and data integrity/security.
My post next week will dive deeper into the wearables market and its potential for expanded use in healthcare applications, especially women’s health.
March is Endometriosis Awareness Month. To raise awareness about endometriosis, each of my articles this month will have some connection to the disease or women’s healthcare more broadly. Learn more about endometriosis here. Join me in donating to advance research and advocacy on capitol hill for endometriosis.
This paradigm shift is also relevant to civil space, but it more pronounced in the national security space community.