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Tag: the future of medicine

Healthcare’s Perpetual War

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By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

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There are three visions of peace in the seemingly never ending, but really rather brief, Israeli-Palestinian perpetual crisis. One peace features two independent countries living in collaborative harmony on a piece of land approximately the size of New Jersey. Another peace yearns for a messianic Jewish state stretching from the blue Mediterranean shores to the Jordan River, and possibly beyond. The third and final peace is expected to materialize after the Zionist entity has been permanently erased from the face of this earth, or at least from the face of that New Jersey size holy piece of land.  Each definition is amenable to slight compromises in form, but not at all in substance.

There are three visions for the future of medicine in the seemingly insurmountable, but really rather minor, perpetual health care crisis in America. One future of medicine sees physicians unencumbered by useless administrative tasks, wielding sleek and useful technology tools, offering the best medical care to all patients who need and want attention. Another future is yearning for the revival of chickens and charity as bona fide methods of payment for whatever medical care the free market wishes to bestow on the less fortunate. The third and final future is one devoid of most middling and often faulty doctors, where the health of the nation is enforced by constant computerized surveillance with fully automated preemptive interventions.  Each definition is amenable to slight compromises in form, but not at all in substance.Continue reading…

Is Health Care about to Go the Way of the Dodo?

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By Lucien Engelen

As the new year started, all kinds of predictions come to our attention, mostly of things that will enter our lives.

How about things that will dissolve from our lives ?

Of all species that became extinct the Dodo has become sort of synonymous with extinction. To “go the way the Dodo”means something is headed to go out of existence. (picture and quote source The Smithsonian)

So this goes not only for species but also stuff we use or things we do.

You might want to have a look at the extinction timeline and find things you did, ‘some’ time ago, and don’t anymore.

But what about health care? What will vanish, will the doctor due to all of this new technology disappear, or the nurse? Will we no longer go to a hospital or to the doctors office? I don’t think so.

We still will be needing professionals with compassion and care. However shift is happening and some things will start getting obsolete. In the following I am in no way going to try to be exhaustive, so feel free to add in comments or thought on what you think will disrupt from our lives in terms of health(care).

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My Grand, Sweeping Cardiovascular Predictions for 2013

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By Dr. Wes

Cardiovascular predictions for next year are always fun to contemplate this time of year.  So much is happening to the practice of medicine as we’ve known it that it can be helpful to highlight some of those changes, both good and bad, as our medical world continues to evolve.  While these predictions contain pure guesses, they also contain one doctor’s observations of our new evolving medical world.  Many of these changes will profoundly shape how doctors interact with their patients.

So grab some coffee and strap in.  Here are my 2013 predictions of life as a cardiologist in 2013.  (Please feel free to add your own predictions in the comments section.)

Valvular Heart Disease

  • TAVR for critical aortic stenosis will be applied to progressively younger and healthier patients.
  • As smaller delivery systems for percutaneous heart valves gain widespread acceptance, government payers will look for new and inventive techniques to restrict patient access to these devices.  No heart valve will remain untouched as creative uses of the approved devices are attempted in non-surgical patients.
  • Innovations valve design will improve the safety and effectiveness of this therapy.

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First, Do Net Harm?

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By Eric Topol, MD

Recently, the US Preventative Services Task Force reiterated its recommendation that women not undergo routine screening for ovarian cancer. This was remarkable, not simply because it was a recommendation against screening, but because the task force was making the recommendation again, and this time even stronger.

The motivation for the recommendation was simple: a review of years’ worth of data indicates that most women are more likely to suffer harm because of false alarms than they are to benefit from early detection. These screenings are a hallmark of population medicine—an archetypal form of medicine that does not attempt to distinguish one individual from another. Moving beyond the ritualistic screening procedures could help reduce the toll of at least $765 billion of wasted health care costs per year.

We already know the common changes in the DNA sequence that identify people who have higher risk of developing ovarian, breast or prostate cancer and most other types of cancer. Consumers can now readily obtain this information via personal genomic companies like 23andMe or Pathway Genomics. But we need to do much more DNA sequencing to find the less common yet even more important variations—those which carry the highest risk of a particular cancer. Such research would be easy to accomplish if it were given top priority and it would likely lead to precision screening. Only a small fraction of individuals would need to have any medical screening. What’s more, it will protect hundreds of thousands of Americans from being unnecessarily harmed each year.

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Vinod Khosla Thinks I’m Narrow-Minded

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By Margaret Polaneczky, MD

There’s a (tiny) bit of a discussion going on in Twitter about a post I wrote responding to Vinod Khosla’s statement that 80% of the work that doctors do will one day be replaced by computer algorithms.

In my post, I talked a bit about the marketplace-driven IT innovations in healthcare, and medicine as seen through the eyes of the IT entrepeneurs. I questioned just how much of what doctors do today can really be replaced by algorithms, particularly the doctor-patient relationship.

I then asked if Khosla was right and answered myself – Maybe. I stated that we were in the midst of a huge disruption in healthcare, and reflected on how I was already seeing signs of that disruption in my current practice.  And while I still did not see anything changing too much just yet, as far as the future Khosla predicted? I wasn’t so sure.

I then stated that if there is a revolution in healthcare, we docs needed to make ourselves a part of it now. I urged my fellow physicians to become involved, in order to be sure that what happens in the IT-driven healthcare future actually improves our patients’ health beyond what we are doing today.

It’s a completely legitimate concern, and, I believe, an extremely important one.  As an example, I cited the evolution of the EMR – a system that has created high hopes and caused huge disruption at enormous cost, even as we continue to struggle to find conclusive evidence that EMR use actually improves patient outcomes.

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Bad Directions

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By Rob Lamberts, MD

I love the GPS analogy for health care.  Patients need a GPS for their health, showing them the reality of their past, present, and future health.  The analogy has not only shown me how I want to give care for my patients, it has also given me insight into the pitfalls of automated medical care.

Way back in the days when GPS was new, the rental care company Hertz advertised “NeverLost,” a GPS on your dashboard (if you forked out the extra money for it).  I was asked to give a talk in Oregon, and decided I would try out this cool new technology (since others were picking up my bill).  While I found it overall very useful, there were a couple of times it didn’t work as advertised.

  • I needed a sweatshirt, so  I used the NeverLost for directions to a Wal-Mart.  It worked!  It gave me flawless directions to a Wal-Mart store…in Las Vegas (over 1000 miles away).  I stopped at a gas station and they told me that there was actually a Wal-Mart 1/2 mile down the road.
  • Then, when I was trying to get to Crater Lake, “Never Lost” repeatedly directed me down dirt roads, some of which had trees fallen across their path.  NeverLost was quite perturbed when I didn’t follow its direction, nagging me to make an immediate u-turn back toward the tree in the road.

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HealthCamp Boston 2012: Brainstorming the Future of Health Care

By David Harlow

HealthCamp Boston is a forum for people with interest in all areas of health and wellness to gather, to generate ideas, and to take practical steps towards building the future of health care. HealthCamps are different from traditional conferences where speakers talk at you. At HealthCamp Boston, an “unconference,” attendees set the agenda, and all contribute to the event according to their interests.

The Boston area is a center of innovation for all aspects of health care, so you can be certain that people at HealthCamp Boston will be discussing things like:

· Big Data in health care

· Improving engagement and outcomes through mobile devices and social media

· Personalized medicine and translational medicine

· Empowered patients

· Practical impacts of health care reform

· and more…

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The Destructiveness of Measures

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By Dr. Wes

A little box pops up before him asking if he asked the patient about the exercise.  He mumbles something under his breath, clicks a little box beneath the question, then moves on.

This is what medicine has become:  a series of computer queries and measures of clicks.  It must be measurable, quantifiable, and justifiable or it didn’t happen.

Do they ask if I asked them about if they used cocaine?  Of course not: too politically incorrect.

Do they ask if I really listened to their heart?  Of course not – this activity is not a paid activity.

Do they ask about the myriad of phone calls and e-mails to arrange for a procedure?  Nope.

Do they measure my time with the patient when I go back to see them on the same day?  Nope – not paid for.

So what’s the motivation for doctors to be doctors?  Are we retraining our doctors from care-givers to data providers?  What are we losing in turn?

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