Do you think eventually we'll outsource medicine to computers?

Much of medicine and treatment is based on evidence based medicine. Do you think in the future we'll have less doctors and more "computer kiosks" or other health professionals just plugging data into a computer and coming out with a diagnosis?

I'm thinking it might be more efficient as a whole.

 

It seems like the hardest part about medicine is the diagnosis. A diagnosis comes from sifting through a vast array of mostly irrelevant information and narrowing it down to the best candidate or two for the right answer you need. That sounds a lot like a search engine to me.

 

Things like the Minute Clinics:
http://www.minuteclinic.com/

 

Yes. Treatment protocols can be determined using a standard format...maybe overall there may be some errors, but I think they'll probably be near levels of errors that physicians would make anyways.

Obviously you can't get rid of doctors. But perhaps doing things like outsourcing data to another country for a diagnosis would be more cost effective. Lab results, treatment plans, etc.

 

Think of it. Hiring low paid, highly trained doctors in somewhere in India, like a call center who take video calls from a healthcare worker in this country to come up with a treatment plan. A doctor's call center...that would be something.

 

I think it could be much more sophisticated than what you describe.

Imagine once a year you go in for a CT Scan because everybody now does it. This scan takes millions of pictures cross-secting your body. Then a database compares the pictures year-to-year. It sees a small tumor emerging one year that wasn't there the year before. This is automatically compared against a database of similar types of tumors, with the odds of it developing into a major problem calculated. If the odds seem high enough, you get an email with the info and a biopsy is scheduled. At no point in this process is an actual MD consulted.

Or say you have sophisticated medical records that show on your mom's side there is a history of strokes. You are also left-handed, which a database shows has a 4.5% higher rate of a certain type of stroke. Your CT scan shows that you are 35 lbs heavier than you were two years ago, and a genetic test performed on you at birth has you flagged as a 10% higher risk of diabetes. A database takes all these factors into account and calculates the optimal drug that will not create a risk of stroke but nudges you away from diabetic risk, given your weight gain. An MD reads the report, shrugs and rubber stamps the prescription. The system fabricates a pill, but also packs into it 26% of the vitamin C it notices you've been leaving out of your diet, plus an anti-inflamatory to take care of that ankle twist it happened to notice.

Now, say all these databases of patient medical history were linked. Suddenly doctoral students and pharmaceutical companies can run all sorts of on-the-fly studies to find correlations. Maybe women who are 18-23 who take one aspirin a day are 37% less likely to have cervical cancer at 45. There's no way to get at that level of data right now without conducting a major study, but if you start connecting the databases of peoples' medical history science could be exposed to all sorts of crazy correlations.

In a decade or two I think a janitor will be able to do most of what House does. The real insights will come in these correlative studies. But even there you could probably develop software that sifts through the countless possible correlations to find the ones that are really interesting.

 

I think so. There's a huge amount of innovation to be made in medicine using technology.

 

I'm wondering if in the future, you can do a medical consult on your phone or an ipad. That would be something. Use the camera to send videos, etc.

 

There are people who FREAK OUT when you talk about sharing medical records. Some are militant about keeping medical histories and information private. So while I think all these ideas about pooling everyone's medical records is perhaps a good thing, some people only see forced euthanasia and higher levels of abortions/gene sequencing in embryos.

 

The biggest future breakthrough in medicine, in my opinion, is non-invasive portable scanning equipment, like a Star Trek tricorder. That will become science fact sooner than you think.

 

I think that's mostly a biproduct of living in a "pre-existing condition" culture. People don't want their insurance rates jacked because word gets out. Thanks to Obama, the term "pre-existing condition" is going to sound ridiculous to people in a few years. A nasty term of a bygone era.

 

Why call it Insurance then? As soon as you get sick, buy "insurance", then cancel and repeat.

 

Because of the mandates everybody will be required to have insurance. Man, this is health care reform 101.

 

I hope not. My doctor's kinda hot. Small fingers, too.

 

You vicious bastard, lol.


Repped.

 

I seriously doubt within the next 100 years any of this will happen. The human body is too complex and there are too many variables. There is still way too much science doesn't understand about us to expect nanochips or whatever to essentially eliminate the need for doctors.

One of what is certainly could be a million examples is my daughter. At age 27 she ran 5 miles on a Monday, as was her usual daily habit. By Thursday she couldn't walk across a room without passing out. She was struck that fast with an incurable and fatal disease. Nobody knows why it happens and thus far it is unpredictable. Some people take medicine and manage to live a semi normal life. For others the medicine has no effect and they either asphyxiate to death within a few years or die of an enlarged heart. Why? No one knows and no one can predict who will and will not respond to what type of medicine. We'd have to predict, diagnose and treat millions of things like this before we can ever place medicine in the hands of computers.

Besides, Microsoft won't let us.

 

I seriously doubt within the next 100 years any of this will happen. The internet is too complex and there are too many variables. There is still way too much documentation to expect search engines or whatever to essentially eliminate the need for librarians.