Yes and it’s been ahead of the game for a while. Even in 1980 when I was a young doctor in A&E, where sprained ankles were our bread and butter, no amount of reassurance, ice and tubigrip could get patients back on their feet faster than a radiographer brandishing a normal X-ray.
And technology has moved ahead faster than anyone could have ever imagined. Just as we are approaching the horizon of driverless cars, so we ought to be approaching the horizon of doctor-less hospitals.
Dictate your symptoms, complete a short questionnaire and Dr Google compiles a list of investigations, books your appointment at the local Test Centre, where you are processed with Amazon-like efficiency through each department. Medical AI checks your results against a series of common conditions, your results are sent to a specialist for checking and you get your answer by phone or text.
What stands in the way of this vision? Not economics, people are the most expensive part of any process, not least, because being slow learners they take years to train. The fewer humans, and the more robots involved in an industrial process, the more efficient it can become. Someone needs to build an AlphaGo and AlphaZero for medicine. However at this stage, I suspect we have invested too much money in greedy doctors, large administrative bases (formerly known as hospitals) and a trillion dollar industrial pharmaceutical complex.
What future for human in healthcare?
1 – Human understanding and compassion: robots are not empathic, and are rubbish at breaking bad news
2 – The ability to deal with unpredictable situations and find creative solutions: Robots can’t think outside the box, they aren’t meant to. They are useless when faced with symptoms and results that do not fit their algorithms.
3 – Explaining things: if you don’t speak Python, communicating with a robot is tricky. Subtlety, sarcasm, meaning and interpretation are lost on robots.
There are plenty of instances where we still need people, especially intelligent compassionate people. And if technology makes us better doctors, bring it on! because human health is deteriorating year on year and technology is one thing that might dig us out of our rapidly deepening hole of degenerate disease.