Replacing Doctors with ATMs: Another Take on Medicine's Future
Wednesday, July 26, 2006 at 10:31AM I like to discuss the ideological divide of the healthcare establishment of MDs, Big Pharma, and the FDA versus providers of holistic care. Now there's another take on the conflicts within medicine, coming from investor Andy Kessler in a provocative new book, "The End of Medicine". Rather than an ideological divide, he sees a digital divide.
Not surprisingly, he views America’s healthcare industry, estimated at more than $1 trillion in annual revenues, from an investment standpoint. Healthcare as investment has been a risky arena, since there have been more than a few mirages and hiccups on the path to opportunity, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and computerization of medical records. Kessler predicts that healthcare will be revolutionized by digitally-based early-detection techniques that will alert patients and their doctors to signs of cancer and heart disease years in advance of current methodologies. Kessler in the book takes readers on a sometimes-tedious personal journey through a healthcare system still dependent on stethoscopes and rubber hammers tapped on kneecaps. Readers observe him being poked and prodded in humorous assessments of existing diagnostic technology, all part of a process designed to pave the way for appreciating the logic of the changes he concludes are inevitable. He visits medical research centers to explore leading-edge techniques for measuring chemical and structural changes within the body, and makes a strong case for a digital revolution that will lead to a revolution in medicine’s approach to diagnostics.
Like many outside observers, he has trouble making sense of Big Pharma, the FDA, and MDs. He equates the FDA to the FCC, and Big Pharma to regional telephone companies--in other words, a questionable government regulation challenge. At the end of his journey, though, he is cynical, and excited. "Doctors use ancient tools, memorize symptoms and solutions, and a halfway decent search engine can leave them in the dust. But now, the days of doctors are over. How do I know? Go back to tellers. Almost everything a teller knew was embedded into the software of an ATM. Instead of paying $25,000 for a pleasant teller who would smile while counting out your twenties, you could put four of them outside the bank and run them 24 hours a day, Sundays, too."
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Reader Comments (1)
A doctor provides a comforting role in interpreting tests and sorting through an overwhelming amount of information. Even if we become more skilled at self-diagnoses or computer diagnoses, I doubt very much that people will feel confident in their conclusions. I also find it hard to believe that software programs will be so sophisticated as to yield singular diagnoses more than statistical probabilities which have to be interpreted. In fact, I would think in the future we would have more diseases and more possible diagnoses. Sure there are people, like independent investors, self-representing defendants, etc. who do not feel that they need a living expert to coach them. I'm sure there might be a crowd of confident self-diagnosticians with all of the tools that we develop. However, I believe that the vast majority of the population enjoys the benefits of having another set of eyes and the independent perspective of expertise in order to make sense of whatever their intial self-diagnoses reveal.