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The greatest threat to our economy is health care costs and the best way to reduce this cost and deliver superior care is to automate much of medical from pharmacists to doctors.
Much of current medical in the US could be automated with current technology and even more so in the future. To say a doctor can out diagnose a machine is the same as saying a person can outrun a Corvette. If we don't embrace technology to lower health care costs the US WILL GO BANKRUPT for two reasons. The direct cost of using the most expensive least effective option in most cases and severely limiting the potential of our human capital through inferior care. This will be more a political and moral conflict than a technical one. Soon, hard choices will have to be made and the tech sector will be a critical voice in this discussion.
My GP calls computerized medicine "test tube medicine". Interestingly, Google does not match anything for the common medical school term "test tube mediicine", i.e. physicians treat human patients. Maybe it is on Google's black list.
smeyer, Even the top orthopedist I ever went to and I have been to many, suggested I do my own research since I was capable and he said he can only devote about 15 minutes to reading a day. Imagine going into a clinic and being hooked up by a tech to many sensors, multi spectrum scanner and such giving you a totally superior check up or diagnosis. I have a Tanita Iron Man scale that gives me 8 different body parameters and it's about 8 years old. Much of this could be done at home with a smart scale and a scan done by smart phone camera. Add a few inexpensive devices and you could add several more parameters. Have this interpreted by a program with all the latest research and you could have a monthly physical at home for a very small fee or as an add on to your ISP account. It would only take a second or two of super computer time to give you a far better diagnostic than any human.
The biggest problems are paying attention, keeping the
-understanding- (this is more than data) straight and
prosecuting a patient care plan when there's something
to be done. I see this stuff failing all the time at the
place La Wifey deals with. No mind share outside the
15 minutes in the exam room, all forgotten by next
visit.
When computers can be trained to give a damn, then
maybe you'll have something. Otherwise it's just more
Computer Assisted Apathy.
The biggest problems are paying attention, keeping the
-understanding- (this is more than data) straight and
prosecuting a patient care plan when there's something
to be done. I see this stuff failing all the time at the
place La Wifey deals with. No mind share outside the
15 minutes in the exam room, all forgotten by next
visit.
When computers can be trained to give a damn, then
maybe you'll have something. Otherwise it's just more
Computer Assisted Apathy.
You are totally wrong. With wearables you won't be looking at a 15 minute time frame to work with, but 24/7/365. This is the difference of looking through a straw and having both eyes wide open. Also no 15 minute exam can look at up to 20 or 30 parameters over time. No doctor can have the latest data on tap all the time like a data base. To say a doctor can compete with an extensive relational data base program is like saying you can out race a Corvette on foot. This will actually benefit the great doctors with great inisght by leveraging their knowledge across literally billions of people instead of just one at a time and this will be done in real time without months and even years of delay waiting for the knowledge to spread. It is the current system that limits the best knowledge and insights to the privledged wealthy few. In the future even surgury will be augemented by robots more than it already is now and perhaps even be performed completely robotically. Steps are already being taken in this direction and there is no going back. Medicine, like any other profession will become more automated over time. You couldn't design modern semis without EDA and you can't even perform current medicine without modern equipment and data bases and this will only advance at an increasing rate over time as all technologies in all fields have been doing, medical will be no exception. The only limit will be special interests applying pressure through government regulation. If you are seeing failures in your wife's care and application of technology, it is the fault of the plan and I suggest you seek out a medical provider that know how to find, use and apply technology to give the best care. Not all health care providers are equal, like any other field, the quality covers the range from awful to exception
There are hundreds of models of health care sensors and devices, and each one has it's own proprietary data format, there is no standardization, so there's no easy way to share this 24/7/365 medical data with a medical professional, let alone a centralized computer system to make any sense of it.
Even in fast-moving fields like EDA it has taken years and sometimes decades to get competitors to actually cooperate and adopt standards in order to ease software tool integration and allow interoperability between vendors. The same issues apply to the health care field, because every vendor of medical devices is looking out only for their one or handful of devices, not envisioning a way to make all data interoperate because that is altruistic while corporations are focused on making data proprietary and not interchangeable.
Until we have patient records-based systems, you can automate til you're blue in the face and you won't have the big key to overall healthcare cost savings or better healthcare. Currently, systems are built around specialties (radiology, pharmaceuticals, your current HMO/PPO...) that don't talk to each other sufficiently electronically (if at all!). Until you have a national one-patient/one-record system, there's no way doctors OR machines can get a comprehensive view of what's going on. If you have two medications that are interacting badly, for example, prescribed by two different doctors in unlinked systems, who would know unless you did your own research or remembered to mention it when they dragged you unconscious into the emergency room? The reason we don't have this in the US are privacy concerns. So what's it gonna be: privacy or far cheaper and much better healthcare? It's not actually that easy a call...but at least now that the US has the beginning of a national health care plan, so that people can't lose their insurance because of pre-existing conditions, maybe the balance will finally tip toward better healthcare? Of course the Swedes, the Danes, the Fins and a handful of others are already doing it. So wouldn't you expect them to be the first to fully benefit from IoT-based advances? Do other countries that have long had national health plans have any excuse not to go down this path now?
Dan, I agree that's the way it currently is, but even here more and more devices altough different are putting their results into a standard format and this trend is accellerating. Apple and Kaiser are two examples of widespread standards and they are working together. Health care providers know tremendous financial and social pressures are developing and those that have a standard platform will win. Just like sonagrams now becoming just a device head that can be plugged into a laptop, just like many xrays are put in a format for laptops. Even though the systems are different the end result is the same and could be read by the same program. IBM is making huge bets also in this area. Health care is a staggeringly huge industry compared to EDA and in many areas already has standardization across systems many times larger than the entire EDA industry already. Medicare and systems in other countries in medical are already of large size with many countries, companies and organizations seeking standardization. This is more like the computer industry when they were setting up standards than EDA for the stakes are a seven trillion dollar market that spans every human on earth. This is one reason the the battle for standards in the smart watch/body monitor has so many companies fighting to be the standard. Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft and others are already in this battle for dominance for they know to loose is to become a tier two company.
The bottom line is that medical currently has 3 billion high value customers with 3.5 billion coming on and expenditures are going up across the board. Just due to current size, scope and expenditure there can be no real comparison between the EDA market and medical. This does not even count the related plant and livestock medical that will use much of the same technology. You can't compare a 5 billion dollar industry that is highly specialized to a seven trillion dollar industry that encompasses everyone on earth. The battle for major companies and countries to set the standard or have a substantial input on the standards has just begun.
The greatest threat to our economy is health care costs and the best way to reduce this cost and deliver superior care is to automate much of medical from pharmacists to doctors.
Much of current medical in the US could be automated with current technology and even more so in the future. To say a doctor can out diagnose a machine is the same as saying a person can outrun a Corvette. If we don't embrace technology to lower health care costs the US WILL GO BANKRUPT for two reasons. The direct cost of using the most expensive least effective option in most cases and severely limiting the potential of our human capital through inferior care. This will be more a political and moral conflict than a technical one. Soon, hard choices will have to be made and the tech sector will be a critical voice in this discussion.
Physician pay represents a small percentage of health care expenses.
Physicians will make better decisions than machines for a long time, due to differences in the way patients describe their conditions.
The government has wasted trillions trying to accelerate technology use with programs that don't help us care for patients.
Get real !!
Physician pay represents a small percentage of health care expenses.
Physicians will make better decisions than machines for a long time, due to differences in the way patients describe their conditions.
The government has wasted trillions trying to accelerate technology use with programs that don't help us care for patients.
Get real !!
feldendo, It isn't as much about physician pay as it is productivity. Also advanced sensors and multi spectrum imaging combined with active test administered by advanced mems will give a far more accurate view of a patients condition. This will of course be combined with questions the program would present to the patient based on input which would be far more accurate than questions physicians would ask and would use big data bases that are constantly updated real time. Medical groups and insurance companies that master this will rapidly take market share from those that don't adopt and utilize the latest technology of all types. Just like many companies have robots fill prescriptions at a small fraction of the cost of people. The same is now true for many medical test groupings. Automation of all types is coming to everything and medical will be no exception. Just like sophisticated engines from cars to get fighters are hooked to a computer for diagnostics. Medical is already automating, it will just speed up. Just like patients in intensive care being hooked to network sensors and being far more accurate than a nurse just looking at a patient. If we don't automate medical, the US will go bankrupt, there is no other option. If there is, please post it. Also devices worn over time will give a far more accurate and in depth view not available in the exam room. Much of current medical procedure is obsolete and unaffordable. Also the US medical costs 400 % more than other industrial countries and ranks 35th in quality which is a indictment of how our system works (look it up, I have had physicians do it in front of me when I tell them that and even they are shocked at the sad state of US medical).
Just like technology has driven down costs in almost everything with hardware and software, medical will be no exception, it is just far more regulated and subject to the pressures of special interests.
I think the "big data" mistake is that anything as complicated as human disease has contradictory data that requires a physician with clinical experience for diagnosis and treatment. Peter Naur explained the fallacy in his 2005 Turing Award lecture as: all non-computational thinking is being surpressed.
There is a story in today's Wall Street Journal that I think claims that the best "computerized" blood test is a scam. URL is:
"In a complaint to regulators, one Theranos employee accused the company of failing to report test results that raised questions about the precision of the Edison system. Such a failure could be a violation of federal rules for laboratories, the former employee said."
Garbage in garbage out in my view. In your brave new world of Medicine people better
hope they only have standard diseases.
>> The reason we don't have this in the US are privacy concerns.
Probably not(although it can be a good smoke screen), or otherwise it wouldn't have happened in many other nations which have even better patient rights.
The main reason , i think is that doctors have little to gain from such system , but it's expensive/complex to shift to for them - and maybe also because of the options it could open for more expert-systems and/or bureaucracy , and maybe more legal risk - which are all strongly resisted by doctors.
I just stumbled upon the concept of the "Blue Button", which was launched by the VA a few years ago, is now in about a third of US hospitals (per Wikipedia). It's a way of getting easy-to-read access to all your medical records together, so you can share them with your doctor. See https://www.healthit.gov/patients-families/your-health-data. Here again, we're not replacing doctors, but leveraging technology to make their jobs much easier and their work more efficient. Fascinating. Could IoT health data be integrated into this Blue Button system? Very cool video on YouTube shows how it work. Wow. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGGnda44Yik&list=UUqynwrKIXFPyUCxqkAZ001w
The cell phone will expand its functionality into health care and bring us a whole new world with 60/60/24/7/367 health care monitoring and even some controls in the future. It will also carry our medical records up to date. The cell phone has evolved to a truly personal computer that will keep expanding functions in ways we haven't even imagined.
