Will Computers Provide Diagnoses in the Future?

One of the most important responsibilities on the shoulders of doctors is providing a diagnosis for each patient that comes or is brought to a healthcare facility.  While other healthcare providers (including nurses, patient care technicians, physical therapists, etc.) can help deliver treatment, the domain of finding out what is wrong with a patient is, in most cases, left exclusively to doctors. 

After all, how can you treat any patient unless you know with relatively good certainty what is wrong?

Yes, several other healthcare experts (lab technicians, radiologists, etc.) help doctors arrive at a diagnosis but, regardless of how competent or experienced these "other" experts are, they only serve as reference/guidance tools for doctors.  In other words, doctors invariably have a monopoly when it comes to diagnoses.

Is this something that should be challenged?  Since doctors undergo the most training and usually have the most education in the healthcare setting hierarchy, it's perhaps in everyone's interest that doctors be allowed to hold on to that monopoly.  On the other hand, considering what technology (especially in regards to IT) is capable of today, perhaps the methodology used to arrive at a diagnosis needs heavy-duty revamping.

For hundreds of years doctors have followed pretty much the same routines when arriving at diagnoses.  They conduct a so-called thorough examination, order chemical tests, use medical imaging (when necessary), and carefully evaluate symptoms and signs.  Even though the medical establishment seems to be set on this paradigm, is it time to argue that maybe more efficient, less-time-consuming and far-more-accurate/expansive systems need to replace our outdated (technologically speaking) model?

Simply put, a computer (storing far more information in its databases than any one doctor can possibly be familiar with) would be far more capable at arriving at a comprehensive, all-possibilities-inclusive diagnosis. Further more, a computer can run informational cross-referencing, instantaneously keep track of disease trends and developments, and analyze all kinds of tangential associations (what unique organisms are creating havoc in places the patient has recently visited, what genetic defects run in a particular family, etc.) no physician is capable of conducting (at least not in his/her head). 

Is anyone suggesting that computers replace doctors?  No, not exactly.  What will most probably happen in the hospital of the future is that all patients in need of a diagnosis will first see a Virtual Health Diagnostics Technician.  This person, after collecting as much information about the patient as possible, including symptoms and signs, will create a preliminary diagnosis, perhaps aided by tests ordered by PAs and Nurse Practitioners. 

The diagnosis thus created might then end up in the hands of a physician who can then decide whether further tests or what type of treatments are called for.  How would this model differ from the one in place now?  For one thing, it would save doctors for more important roles.  Doctors today waste too much time asking patients questions that a lower-level person can also ask; they also spend too much time at the preliminary levels of the diagnostic process.

Actually, this new model is already coming into fruition.  Patients usually see doctors only after lower-level professionals (nurses, PAs, etc.) have done their own investigations//assessments.  But doctors are still getting involved too early in the process.  Especially programmed computers and trained assessment technicians could greatly expand the exploration capacity of diagnostic assessments.  Doctors would then get involved only at the more advanced stages of assessments.  This will save time, money and, in the long run, lives. 

Computers, furthermore, would be less likely to miss a rare disease diagnosis, allow the waste of resources on unlikely scenarios, or be subject to distractions, personal biases, and other impediments that plague human beings.  To reiterate, though, computers would not replace doctors but, rather, maximize their potential.  Diagnostically speaking, they would bring medicine into a true "modern" age.

Copyright, 2014.  Fred Fletcher.  All rights reserved.