The label “Doctor” may or may not remain in the future

On many occasions I have been accused of wanting to replace doctors with computers; I was even brazen enough in one presentation a few years ago, of stating that the age of doctors was coming to an end. I have learned, that I was not correct.

For years there was talk of the possibility of a computer beating a chess Grand Master — and that finally happened in 1996 when IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov. Mr. Kasparov then went on to discover that while a computer could in fact beat a human — the combination of a computer and a human was better than a computer alone. This gave birth to Advance Chess or Centaur Chess as it is called.

Doctors are smart — many doctors in coordinated combination, are smarter. Computers are smart. Many collaborating doctors augmented by computers with access to shared memory — are the smartest of all — and getting more so every day.

The rise of artificial intelligence and connecting minds

In January of 2016, I was in lofty company, as the majority of the big brains of Artificial Intelligence felt that it would take at least 50 years for a computer to beat any human at Go — 50 years. Three months later the Google DeepMind Alpha Go system did just that not “any” average human Go player — but to the world’s 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol.

All the technological advancements still need input for the programs to run. Data is what to Connected Minds what food is to humans, we are what we eat.

The future that many felt was at least 50 years away, appears to already be behind us — and these powerful thinking machines will not stand alone, but will play a central role in our increasing global connectivity. I often refer to “Connecting Minds” and explain it as “Facilitating collaborative information transfer between connected: people, things, and data in an intentional and intelligent manner, so that the total value created is exponentially greater than the sum of the individual parts; this allows us to do more, better, faster, less expensively, everywhere and all of the time, for more people.”

What will change in healthcare

Historically, healthcare was delivered by people in-person at hospitals (or local clinics). Over the past decade or so, we have started to see some of this work being done remotely via telemedicine such as radiology reporting, ICU monitoring by remote intensivists, virtual tumor boards and remote monitoring of a patient’s vital signs from their homes. Workers who do not require physical presence to provide their work value, we refer to as “Healthcare Knowledge Workers” — it is possible that up to one third to one half of all healthcare tasks are performed by “knowledge workers.”

The label “Doctor” may or may not remain in the future; what will change will the following:

1. Who will become doctors — it will continue to become less of an elitist men’s club
2. How they will be trained to become doctors and how long this will take (it will be faster)
3. How much money it will costs to create and maintain a doctor (it will be cheaper)
4. The daily task of a doctor on site
5. The daily tasks of a doctor provided remotely
6. The current tasks of a doctor, that have been replaced by automation (AI)

There is a scene in the movie “The Imitation Game,” where Alan Turing is asked “do you think that computers will ever be able to think as good as humans.” His response was that “computers will think as computers.” There are some tasks best suited for human minds and other tasks are better performed by synthetic processors and storage devices.

Whatever label we assign to those who give care, really does not matter. It is what they do each and every day, and no longer need to do, that will matter the most.

This is an excerpt from the cover story of the July issue of Middle East Medical. See the full story here.

I’m an experienced business executive with more than 20 years of healthcare experience in the USA, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. I have used “connectivity” to improve healthcare for two decades, having established his first tele-radiology and TeleStroke programs in South Asia to improve care for the hospitals under his responsibility. Today with my comVer2 — I continue to use connectivity to improve healthcare in many ways.