To say that technology will change the way medicine is practiced is an understatement, but you may not be aware of the full scope of changes that are on the horizon. There are dozens, if not scores of new technological innovations currently making their way into the mainstream of the medical community, but there are two in particular that will have a direct impact on you and how you interact with your future patients. These two technologies may not be mainstream by the time you graduate, but they will undoubtedly be so during the course of your career. Make their introductions just below. Your Role As RoboSurgeon There are a number of medical ‘bots currently in use today. Among these, perhaps the best known is the DaVinci Surgical Robot. The system was first introduced in 1999, and is becoming increasingly more common as time progresses. There are two basic components to the system, a console where the doctor is seated, and the robot itself, which is rolled over the patient’s bed during the procedure. Utilizing hand controls, the doctor’s hand motions are scaled down in size, in such a way that the doctor is able to perform extremely small, very exacting incisions that might otherwise be difficult, if not outright impossible, through standard means. Statistics gathered by the company thus far on the success of DaVinci have shown that surgeries performed with robotic assistance can remove more cancerous or otherwise damaged tissue with less disruption to the patient’s body and adjacent nerve endings than any other method. By itself, that is an exciting innovation, but it doesn’t stop there. This technology can be, and in fact already has been combined with wireless technology to allow surgical procedures to be conducted remotely. That is to say, if the services of a specialist half a world away were required, using DaVinci or a robot very like it, combined with today’s high bandwidth, low latency connectivity, the surgeon would be able to perform the operation from wherever he was, without having to fly to the surgical site. The first remote surgery was actually conducted in 2001, when surgeons in New York and Stasbourge, France robotically removed a patient’s gall bladder, so this is hardly new tech, or even a new idea. That said, the technology has improved by orders of magnitude since that early effort, and is now more feasible than ever. You can rely on the fact that at some point during your career, you will be performing robotic-assisted surgery. At the moment, DaVinci and related robotic surgical assistance ‘bots are enormously expensive and represent a significant capital outlay for the hospitals that use them. Having said that, once they have been acquired, the hospital’s cost per procedure begin to drop, sometimes sharply. It’s faster, allowing for more procedures to be done, and less invasive/traumatic for the patient. It should also be noted that robotics is currently undergoing something of a second renaissance, thanks to an array of new technological advances and Google’s sudden big push into the industry. Both of these are expected to lower prices in the medium to long term. Your Role As RoboDoc There are at least two companies that have working mobile medical platforms in service today. These are constructed from a modified wheeled surgical cart containing a variety of instrumentation, some have actuated arms that can be manipulated remotely by the doctor connected to the devices, and they feature a high definition camera and monitor on the top, which allows for real time, two-way audio-visual communication between patient and doctor. The doctor can not only manipulate the actuated arms on the device, but can also steer the vehicle, literally enabling him to roam the halls of the hospital where the device is located, without ever having to leave his office. This allows for face to face interaction with patients, while simultaneously allowing the doctor to review the patient’s chart, check vitals, and perform a variety of other medical related tasks. It’s also ideal for allowing direct monitoring and observation of the patient. Not only does this allow a doctor to monitor patients at multiple locations he may be assigned to without having to travel between them, but it is also a means of allowing smaller, rural hospitals access to specialists that they would otherwise be completely cut off from. Prior to the development of these platforms, the only option open to patients in need of highly specialized care had was to either bring the specialist into the rural location (often prohibitively expensive), or to move the patient to a larger facility where the specialist could be found, which of course carries direct risk to the patient in many cases. That is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. The technology allows the doctor to spend more time caring for his patients, and less having to travel from one location to another, with the end result being more time spent on patient care, and an overall improvement in the quality of care. There are some who would argue that these advances dehumanize medicine. That the presence of the doctor physically in the room with the patient adds to the equation in some intangible but important way. It is a legitimate concern. Too often these days, patients are seen in something resembling a human assembly line, with the doctor physically moving from room to room, spending a few minutes looking over what boxes the patient checked on their admissions paperwork, and doing a brief exam. There’s just not time for much else. The fear then, is that these kinds of advances will make the already elusive doctor seem more remote than ever. The opposite view of course, is that far from making the doctor a more remote presence, by eliminating travel time, it will actually give doctors more time to spend with each patient. Here, consumer technology works very much to the medical field’s advantage. After all, tens of millions of people communicate via wireless video chat each day, talking with friends, family, and loved ones. These interactions do not leave family feeling less connected and more alienated from one another, they have exactly the opposite effect. In other words, we have conditioned ourselves to accept that as a perfectly valid, perfectly human form of communication, and there’s no reason to believe that a doctor communicating with a patient will be viewed as being fundamentally different from grandparents vicariously enjoying their grandson’s birthday party via camera from the other side of the country. At the end of the day, what people want is the doctor’s time, attention, and expertise. These technologies give patients more of those things, not less, and the more time the doctor can spend with his patients (virtually or otherwise) the better informed he’ll be about that patient’s condition. No doubt there will be a certain resistance to change as these technologies become increasingly mainstream, but at the end of the day, sick patients want to get better. They want to be made whole again. If their doctors can do that more efficiently and effectively by judicious use of technology, then the patients will inevitably line up in support of it. These changes are here now. They are in use in limited form today. During the course of your career, you will see them becoming increasingly mainstream. source
