Medicine is next. With innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care.
With the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients. Digital avatars won’t replace physicians: You will still be seeing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically altered.
Smartphones already can be used to take blood-pressure readings or even do an electrocardiogram. The patient’s phone hadn’t just recorded the data; it had interpreted it.
Many surveys show that most consumers want to get information about the actual costs of their care from their doctors but can’t get it. Going forward, what things cost will no longer be the great unmentionable hanging over medicine: Cost-transparency apps for your smartphone already exist and are quickly being expanded to cover lab tests, scans, procedures, hospitals and doctor visits.
Using wearable wireless sensors, you can use your smartphone to generate your own medical data, including measuring your blood-oxygen and glucose levels, blood pressure and heart rhythm.
As a result, except for ICUs, operating rooms and emergency rooms, hospitals of the future are likely to be roomless data surveillance centers for remote patient monitoring.
Smartphone attachments will soon enable you to perform an array of routine lab tests via your phone.
With all these new tools, it is no surprise that we’re talking about the possibility of “doctorless” medicine. You’ll still be seeing doctors—but you’ll have a lot more control.
Things had hardly changed two millennia later when Hippocrates, widely considered the father of medicine, held that most medical information should be concealed from patients.
The vast majority of doctors are unwilling to email patients or share their office notes.
Smartphones can be particularly helpful here.
Moreover, while we may find cases in which it is easier to tell things to a digital avatar, we can’t rely on avatars as doctors, powered by DIY physical exams and lab tests alone.
Even as we’re making great strides in capturing personal medical information, we’re way behind in dealing with the data deluge. To make matters even more complicated, none of the new patient-generated data—from sensors, lab tests, self-exams, DNA sequencing or auto-imaging—is flowing into the traditional hospital- or doctor-owned electronic health records.
The real revolution doesn’t come from having your own secure, in-depth medical data warehouse on your smartphone.
As more medical data is generated by patients and processed by computers, much of medicine’s diagnostic and monitoring aspects will shift away from physicians like me. The “doctorless” patient will remain in charge, turning to doctors chiefly for treatment, guidance, wisdom, experience, empathy and the human touch. These doctors won’t write orders; they’ll offer advice.
Just as the printing press democratized information, the medicalized smartphone will democratize health care. Anywhere you can get a mobile signal, you’ll have new ways to practice data-driven medicine. Patients won’t just be empowered; they’ll be emancipated.
Topol is a cardiologist and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He is the author, most recently, of “The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands,” published by Basic Books.
Source: WSJ
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