Overview of the lesson
In this lesson, we started off with discussing about the background of bioBusiness, which are activities based on an understanding of life sciences, life science processes and taking advantage of living systems such as bacterials, germs, virus, humans, plants etc. Next we moved on to talk about the opportunities that bioBusiness has in a bioEnterprise perspective. We acknowledged that low-value added bioBusiness that exist today are valley opportunities, whereby there are many competitors and low barriers of entry. Since bioBusiness is relatively new, and many new discoveries have yet to be made or justified, hence, these are opportunities that people are interested to explore in. Together with the good prospect that bioBusiness can offer to new discoveries and inventions/innovations, more people are now interested to be involved in this area.
We have realized that the global bioBusiness has been contributing to the market share since 2001, however it has been underestimated as we tend to leave out some of the more controversial components such as beauty and sex that are also part of bioBusinesses and they may actually account to 10% of an economy.
Moving on, we had a discussion about the changes in attitude in respect to healthcare from the past 10 to 20 years and how the healthcare and biomedical science have revolutionized. Traditionally, people only seek medical treatment when they fall sick, as for today, we tend to be more health conscious and more open to wellness and healthcare management.
What i found interesting
The most interesting part of lesson 6 was knowing how fast our society is progressing, not only economically, but also in terms of healthcare services and technology. In the beginning of today's lesson, we watched a video called the future vision of healthcare. Which showed us how improvement in technologies have caused an advancement in healthcare services. This video were slightly geared towards being idealistic, however, it is not impossible in near future as many of these individual technologies such as touch screen and video conferences have already exist. Hence in order for the scenario in the video to happen may not take a long time, as they only require the convergence of different existing technologies. In fact, futuristic technologies (e- prescription) have started to prevail in today's society, mainly in the western areas. However one problem is how these existing technologies are pieces together, and who is going to do it and how much cost will it incur. Furthermore, once these technologies are created, will the cost of healthcare services be raise? Making it even more unaffordable for those who are poor. This may cause poorer people to move back to traditional healthcare attitudes, whereby they will only seek help from doctors when the fall sick, or might even choose to not see the doctor even though they are sick, so as to not incur extra cost.
Most important take away
Most important take away for lesson 6 would be the discussion we had on the effect of rising cost of health care services as technologies improve. The cost of healthcare wold inevitably increase as we receive better services from these improved technologies. However, this would bring us back to our previous lessons whereby we discussed about the discrepancies in living conditions among the first and the third world countries. Right now, many third world countries have yet to receive proper sanitation and much less healthcare service, but in may first world countries, many people have already started to take note of wellness and healthcare management and place large emphasis on them. If improvements in technologies continue to increase the price of healthcare services, won't it further deprive the third world countries from receiving proper healthcare? But then again, this is solely based on the argument that improved technologies will prevail in all areas and eliminate basic healthcare services.
How would i like to further this discussion
I would like to learn more about ethical issues that arise due to bioBusinesses and the studies of bioBusiness. Ethical issues are often the grey region whereby it is very hard to differentiate between what is right and what is wrong. However, i believe many interesting points would be brought up if we have a discussion in class.
Rate this session
I would rate this session 9/10. I really enjoyed the discussion we had on healthcare services and the improving healthcare technologies. Healthcare and biomedical science revolution that prof discussed really interest me. And the readings provided for lesson 6 are really interesting and gave me a good insight on future healthcare technologies/studies that we can expect in future.
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