Computers are better at diagnosing and treating patients than doctors. Oh, finally. Personally, I can't wait for computers to replace doctors. I acknowledge all the stuff wherein computers are less prone to mistakes than humans and yada yada yada, but my reasons are completely personal. I am a doctoral candidate at my university and am employed as a researcher by the national academy of sciences in my country. Aside from that, for years I have been teaching, and now teach and work as a program coordinator for a prominent NGO that teaches high school kids science.
I am a respected and sought-after translator of academic texts in my field. I am fucking sick of doctors making assumptions based on my appearance. I want to get sick and have a robot look at me and a computer analyze whatever it has to analyze, and just get me medication or prescribe tea or whatever and get me healthy. The Promise -- and Perils -- of Personalized Medicine. Personalized medicine — the ability to tailor therapies to patients’ individual genetic characteristics — has long been the holy grail of the life sciences industry.
The effort has produced a string of recent successes, including a host of drugs targeted to people with specific genetic profiles, the European approval of the world’s first gene therapy treatment, and a much-heralded leukemia treatment pioneered at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) that uses tweaked versions of patients’ own cells to eliminate their cancer. While these advances are certainly exciting for patients, they raise a host of ethical, legal and financial challenges that people working in the field will need to address before personalized medicine can become a thriving business. The challenges are so great, contends Wharton health care management professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel, that claims of a renaissance in medicine brought on by individualized approaches often seem hyperbolic.
Who Owns Genetic Data? The Future of Big Ed - WorldWise. Will the higher education of the future resemble the changes transforming the medical industry? I read recently a remarkable article in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande called “Big Med.” It tried to outline where medicine might be going next. Given spiraling costs, increasing demand, and lax quality controls, Gawande makes it clear that medicine will—and probably has to—go through a series of changes that will move it from being a craft industry to something that much more closely resembles a conventional industry. He outlines clearly the costs and benefits: “We’ve let health-care systems provide us with the equivalent of greasy-spoon fare at four-star prices, and the results have been ruinous. Perhaps we are starting to see something like this process of change taking place in American and British higher education, too.
On one analysis, all we are seeing is the instigation of a market. So what might an industrial model of higher education look like? Return to Top. Vinod Khosla: Technology Will Replace 80 Percent of Docs. By Davis Liu, MD I recently viewed health care through the lenses of a technology entrepreneur by attending the Health Innovation Summit hosted by Rock Health in San Francisco. As a practicing primary care doctor, I was inspired to hear from Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, listen to Thomas Goetz, executive editor of Wired magazine, and Dr. Tom Lee, founder of One Medical Group as well as ePocrates. Not surprising, the most fascinating person, was the keynote speaker, Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems as well as a partner in a couple venture capital firms. “Health care is like witchcraft and just based on tradition.” Entrepreneurs need to develop technology that would stop doctors from practicing like “voodoo doctors” and be more like scientists.
Health care must be more data driven and about wellness, not sick care. Eighty percent of doctors could be replaced by machines. Khosla assured the audience that being part of the health care system was a burden and disadvantage. Silence. Do We Need Doctors Or Algorithms? Editor’s note: This is Part II of a guest series written by legendary Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures. In Part I, he laid the groundwork by describing how artificial intelligence is a combination of human and computer capabilities. In Part III, he will talk about how technology will sweep through education. I was asked about a year ago at a talk about energy what I was doing about the other large social problems, namely health care and education.
Surprised, I flippantly responded that the best solution was to get rid of doctors and teachers and let your computers do the work, 24/7 and with consistent quality. Later, I got to cogitating about what I had said and why, and how embarrassingly wrong that might be. But the more I think about it the more I feel my gut reaction was probably right. Assessing Current Healthcare Let’s start with healthcare (or sickcare, as many knowledgeable people call it). So what’s wrong with this situation? NHS to crowdsource the next wave of healthcare apps.
The UK's Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has launched a competition inviting developers, doctors and patients to submit ideas for health apps that could help patients make informed decisions about their care. In addition to coming up with new ideas for apps, Lansley is also inviting people to suggest their favourite existing apps. One example mentioned is Choose Well, developed by NHS Yorkshire and Humber, which allows you to find your nearest NHS health services. Another is iBreastCheck from Breakthrough Breast Cancer, which provides women with a guide to checking their breasts for abnormalities. Suggestions can be submitted over the next six weeks and they will be judged by a panel including Dr Shaibal Roy, an investigator from the National Institute for Health Research; Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS Medical Director; Dragons' Den judge Julie Meyer, and Jennie Ritchie-Campbell, Director of Cancer Services Innovation at Macmillan Cancer Support. Robot nurses are less weird when they don't talk.
Medical patients would probably be OK with semi-autonomous robots tending to them, but only if the robots don't talk to them first. Robotics researchers tested whether a verbal explanation from a robot would help people feel more comfortable with the robot administering care, but found that precisely the opposite is true. "Robotics has mostly been about teaching machines how to not touch people, walls, chairs and other objects," said robotics researcher Tiffany Chen of the Georgia Institute of Technology, part of a team that presented the study March 9 at a human-robot-interaction conference in Switzerland.
"This is one of the first steps toward understanding what happens when robots touch people. " Most semi-autonomous robots do precise or dangerous grunt work, such as assemble automobiles or help neutralise improvised bombs. Now robots have advanced to the point that they are ready to take on more delicate work, such as assisting nurses. "The results of the voice timing surprised us. Vinod Khosla: Machines will replace 80 percent of doctors. Machines will replace 80 percent of doctors in a healthcare future that will be driven by entrepreneurs, not medical professionals, according to Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla. Khosla, who wrote an article entitled Do We Need Doctors Or Algorithms?
Earlier this year, made the controversial remarks at the Health Innovation Summit in San Francisco, hosted by seed accelerator Rock Health. The article had already touched on some of the points of his keynote speech, however it was at the summit that the investor challenged a room full of doctors to disagree with his argument -- a challenge that was met with silence. With no qualms about offending an auditorium filled with practicing doctors, Khosla went on to refer to common medical practice as being akin to voodoo, saying "healthcare is like witchcraft and just based on tradition" rather than data driven, as he believes it should be. "There are some things that may never be codified or driven into algorthims," argues Liu.