Having a patients entire history at your fingertips collected through their lifetime.
Being able to apply machine learning to their symptoms to find possible obscure issues
Being able to combine data from populations to find new symptoms for illnesses
Being able to identify outbreaks alot faster
Better ability to analyize complex data to prevent drug interaction
And so many more.
No I think primary care and internal medicine physicians are threatened by technology and are resisting it, because 95% of what their job consists of is exactly what computers are really really good at, crunching data to find statistically likely outcomes.
Tech is going to do to medicine what is already happening in Law. Put 90% of physicians out of business by making the few employed physicians infinitely more productive.
In a 20 years we're going to view having a physician diagnose you as primitive as having a physician bleed you with leeches.
From what I've seen from EHRs and other related software, they're absolute garbage to use. I wouldn't want to use one either.
Anyone that works to eat is in the same boat.
It is also annoying when professional “priests” commit what amounts to claiming only they have the mystical gifts to interpret what aren’t “tea leaves,” when it’s usually done out of fears of job security, special power and/or change of a legally-protected professional class.
It's a basic data analysis which is exactly what computers are good at.
No Tea Leaves involved.
This whole pushback by physicians is about status, jobs, wealth, etc.
In a 20 years we're going to view having a physician diagnose you as primitive as having a physician perform bloodletting or trepanation on you.
This has benefits and costs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA
FOSS software suffers from the same problems gaining a foothold in healthcare as it does in most sectors - namely a lack of money to spend on sales, and a malaise of FUD.
My social worker friend already uses a SaaS for his billing and patient management.
I think technology will massively enable solo practitioners.
Perhaps some day, the medical field will experience the same boom in open source and inexpensive services. That day ain't tomorrow.
Its better to be the oracle with the Tea Leaves garnering the accompanying salaries and status.
>> Perhaps some day, the medical field will experience the same boom in open source and inexpensive services. That day ain't tomorrow.
You're right it's today. There's a bunch of HIPPA compliant, reasonably priced SaaS's available to do just this. Google it.
The obstacle lies in getting medical professionals to give their status, cush jobs, and money over to a machine for the betterment of patients and the field, which is going to be a hard won battle.
I for one can't wait until a nurse with good beside manner takes my samples and symptoms, sends them to a lab/records them in an EHR, and a machine with zettabytes of data and years of machine learning diagnosis me with more accuracy than a human ever could imagine.
You don't need to trust, but only use a little logic. Would a doctor prefer to reduce expenses and increase profits? Of course there's some interest in preserving status quo, but as that "Cult of the Root Cause" [0] article pointed out, there can be many system dynamics working simultaneously.
Just consider all the conversations people have about Google. Life is just so much better with Google Search and YouTube -- learning things is so easy now. Yet, there are some nagging doubts about what we gave up to have that access to information.