The essential guide by one of America's leading doctors to how digital
technology enables all of us to take charge of our health
A trip to the doctor is almost a guarantee of misery. You'll make an
appointment months in advance. You'll probably wait for several hours
until you hear the doctor will see you now-but only for fifteen minutes!
Then you'll wait even longer for lab tests, the results of which you'll
likely never see, unless they indicate further (and more invasive)
tests, most of which will probably prove unnecessary (much like
physicals themselves). And your bill will be astronomical.
In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top
physicians, shows why medicine does not have to be that way. Instead,
you could use your smartphone to get rapid test results from one drop of
blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and use an
artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having
to see a doctor, all at a small fraction of the cost imposed by our
modern healthcare system.
The change is powered by what Topol calls medicine's Gutenberg moment.
Much as the printing press took learning out of the hands of a priestly
class, the mobile internet is doing the same for medicine, giving us
unprecedented control over our healthcare. With smartphones in hand, we
are no longer beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in
which doctor knows best. Medicine has been digitized, Topol argues; now
it will be democratized. Computers will replace physicians for many
diagnostic tasks, citizen science will give rise to citizen medicine,
and enormous data sets will give us new means to attack conditions that
have long been incurable. Massive, open, online medicine, where
diagnostics are done by Facebook-like comparisons of medical profiles,
will enable real-time, real-world research on massive populations.
There's no doubt the path forward will be complicated: the medical
establishment will resist these changes, and digitized medicine
inevitably raises serious issues surrounding privacy. Nevertheless, the
result-better, cheaper, and more human health care-will be worth it.
Provocative and engrossing, The Patient Will See You Now is essential
reading for anyone who thinks they deserve better health care. That is,
for all of us.
