Medical physicists are now an intrinsic part of the global healthcare. While currently there are around than 26,000 medical physicists globally, these are unequally distributed. The IOMP data shows that around 17,000 of these are in North America and Europe, while the rest are serving the three largest continents – Asia, Africa and Latin America. In these places the number of medical physicists per head of the population is minimal, what reflects on the quality of healthcare in radiotherapy, medical imaging, radiation/hospital safety, etc.
The recent Report of the Global Task Force on Radiotherapy for Cancer (Lancet Oncology, 2015) estimates that, only for the needs of Radiotherapy by 2035, the number of newly-trained medical physicists will be of approximately: 17,200 for High-income countries and 22,100 for Low-and-Middle-Income countries. Adding the needs for medical physicists contributing to Medical Imaging (there is a current project about this at present) will result in approximately tripling the global number of medical physicists in the next two decades.
This challenge in front of the profession can only be addressed with concerted efforts in the field of education. These will surely embrace e-learning – an area in which medical physics is one of the world pioneers. The statistics of the IOMP shows that at its formation (around 1965) there had been roughly 6,000 medical physicists in the world. In the next three decades (1965-1975; 1975-1985; 1985-1995) their growth had been about 2,000 specialists per decade. With the introduction of e-learning, soon after 1995, the growth in the decade 1995-2005 had doubled to 4,000. In the following decade (2005-2015) the expansion of e-Learning use and the focus on education has further doubled the growth to 8,000 per decade. These figures present an important trend, which will be the main solution to the expected growth by 2035.

Medical physicists and biomedical engineers play a key role in patient management in healthcare and in the evolution of medicine. They contribute to diagnosis and treatment of diseases, research and development of better devices for clinical use, testing and commissioning of new technologies and clinical modalities for proper and safe clinical applications, and management of such technologies in healthcare. The importance of medical physicists and biomedical engineers in healthcare may be demonstrated by the continual and rapid manpower growth of the two professions over the years. These professionals were brought together by IUPESM in 1980 when IFMBE and IOMP formed a Union. The Union formed a platform for scientific interaction and collaboration among the two streams of professionals. It also created the synergy for cross-cultivation of new ideas and innovations in research and development. In front of them are challenging but exciting new frontiers in medicine. Promising new approaches in disease management and intervention procedures are being developed which are based on new biological models that are built to the genetic and DNA level. These new procedures are potentially more effective in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. For instance, early diagnosis of diseases is possible by studying the molecular behavior or DNA sequence in cells and treatment of resistive diseases can become effective by modifying the genetic makeup of cells and molecules in the immune system or diseased tissue volume. Other new innovations such as systems medicine and personalized medicine are gaining momentum in their development. The application of artificial intelligence, big data and associated analytical tools, DNA sequencing and associated laboratory testing and analytical tools, and high precision and automated diagnostic and therapeutic systems are under development and testing. Medical physicists and biomedical engineers have a lot to offer and contribute in these new developments in medicine.

Healthcare services landscape is changing rapidly due to multiple factors, ie healthcare economics leading to reformation in the healthcare system, major trends in public health, continuing advances in our understanding of human biology that has the potential impact on medical practice and the development of new innovative technologies for effective and precise diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. With advances in technology, how then would future healthcare and medicine look like? Would the approach gravitate towards patient-centered and personalized medicine? Particularly with the development wearables, data analytics, IoT and artificial intelligence etc. The proliferation of health centric devices and digital health will certainly give rise to connected health with increased fitness awareness. Aside from the digital revolution, multi-scale bioengineering approaches are also making impact in healthcare and medicine. In the understanding of cellular and molecular processes in pathology, and integration of computational modeling and in-vivo experimentations to address issues in tissue remodeling, injury risk prediction and device design. As such the field of medical and biological engineering has an important role to constantly attain scientific innovation and translate invention to practice, so as to enhance the healthcare interventions. Even so, there are four key challenges which must be overcome to achieve better healthcare services, ie comparative effectiveness, cost containment and reduction, global inequities and accessibility to medicine. In view of these challenges, a systems and multidisciplinary approach would be required to address the complex interactions to achieve better healthcare services.