When doctors start prescribing Technology

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Prescribing the Future: When doctors hand out Technology instead of Pills

In just a few years, your doctor may write you a prescription not for medication, but for a device. The kind you wear at home, live with daily, and that silently monitors your health in the background.

This is not a distant vision anymore. The NHS is piloting an AI discharge tool that drafts summaries from medical records to help free up hospital beds and precious resources - part of a broader 10-year digitisation push. It’s a small but significant signal: healthcare is moving beyond pills and procedures, toward a model where technology itself becomes the prescription.

⌛ Compressing timelines

Healthcare transformation has traditionally unfolded over decades. But if the last ten years have taught us anything (from the rise of consumer wearables to FDA-cleared digital tools) it’s that adoption curves can bend quickly.

For this next shift to succeed, 10-year plans need to compress into 2–3. And for that, one thing is key: collaboration with startups.

🎯 What tomorrow will look like

Imagine your GP prescribing not a pill, but a device designed to prevent illness before it starts:

• Smart earbuds that track blood pressure, oxygen, and stress, and alert your doctor before an issue escalates (looking at the state of the art… OmniBuds).

• Smart textiles woven into clothing that detect subtle early signs of neurological decline (companies like Nextiles).

• AI digital twins that simulate personalised treatments virtually before prescribing them in real life (Unlearn.AI is applying this in clinical trials).

• At-home AI therapy that rivals in-person care like Sword Health’s physiotherapy model, which is now charging into new spaces with bullish momentum.

In this model, your home becomes the first line of care: a connected ecosystem where continuous monitoring, prevention and adaptation quietly happen around you.

🏠 From far-fetched to familiar

Ten years ago, few imagined that:

• Pulse oximeters: once confined to hospital wards, they would become household staples, stocked in bathroom cabinets and ordered from Amazon during COVID as casually as thermometers

• Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) would scale worldwide, moving from a niche tool for Type 1 diabetics to a mainstream wellness product, worn by athletes and quantified-self enthusiasts to fine-tune diet and performance.

• Apple Watches would not just count steps but secure FDA clearance, evolving into regulated medical devices capable of detecting real conditions.

These shifts happened faster than the healthcare establishment expected. Consumer demand, paired with incremental validation, turned fringe gadgets into frontline tools.

The lesson: what begins as a curiosity often becomes infrastructure. The once far-fetched has a habit of becoming normal, and soon, prescribable.

🧠 A Question for the Future

If doctors could prescribe any “healthcare of the future” device, what would it be?

That’s a conversation worth starting… because the future of medicine won’t just live in hospitals but in our homes.

🙋‍♀️ Ines

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