The world is undergoing a profound demographic shift with an aging population. According to estimates from the United Nations World Population Prospects 2022 update, the percentage of the population aged 65 years or over in the world will increase from its current level of 9.7% of 8.0 billion people (776 million) to 16.4% of 9.7 billion people (1591 million) in 2050. For an aging population, chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses have become the leading cause of death and disability. Chronic diseases not only adversely impact one’s quality of life, they also manifest as a major economic burden, especially for many countries with a higher proportion of older people.

To mitigate and cope with this predictable impending surge in the need for chronic disease care, current healthcare systems need to transition from principally focusing on a reactive model of care in which intervention is made only when an individual experiences an adverse healthcare event to a more proactive and upstream approach. This requires increasing emphasis on early detection, prevention, and patient education and engagement in order to improve overall population health. The challenge is to accelerate the transition to scalable, economically feasible and geography-specific contextually practical approaches to proactive healthcare systems that increasingly emphasize predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory care in order to make progress in realizing the vision of “P4 Healthcare” first advocated by Dr. Leroy Hood since the early 2000’s.

It is the aim of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Medical Technology to present state-of-the-art progress in demonstrating how technological innovations are being used to support the transition to population health as well as to the broader vision of P4 healthcare. We are open to receiving evidence-based submissions across various stages of the healthcare delivery lifecycle including earlier stage R&D pilot projects, to clinical trials or other related trials of any size, to ongoing production deployments of any size, as well as state-of-the-art commercial solutions that are actually being trailed or actually deployed. Our goal is to select and publish an illuminating set of rigorously described, evidence-based examples that can that can help public and private sector healthcare providers and healthcare related policymakers formulate their future healthcare technological roadmaps and strategies.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) how the following technologies are being used to improve population health and/or contribute to aspects of P4 Healthcare in ways that are supportive of population health efforts:
- Artificial Intelligent and Machine Learning
- Privacy-Preserving Tech
- Precision Medicine
- Edge Computing
- Healthcare Big Data Platform
- Behavioral Nudges
- Wearables and IoTs

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Frontiers in Medical Technology

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