Technology in Healthcare is Not About Replacing Humans
Photo credits: Alexander Sinn
As with many other industries, healthcare is being rapidly transformed by technology—both software and hardware. At our important inflection point today, the mindset through which we view these transformations influences the impact that these technologies can achieve. Understandable social unease about “the robots taking our jobs” could hold back progress in health and medicine. On the other hand, we run the risk of losing sight of the fundamental humanity of healthcare as we pursue technology that is ever more pervasive and powerful.
As together we design the future of healthcare, what can we learn from the development of technology in other verticals?
💡 In my view, technology in healthcare is not about replacing humans. Rather, AI, robotics, and other tech can deliver superpowers to our dedicated and passionate healthcare providers while enabling patients and their families to have more agency in their own health.
Technology can fundamentally expand where healthcare takes place: not just in classical hospitals, but potentially everywhere. Health-related data can be gathered in a variety of forms from wearables on our bodies, devices in our homes (including ones that aren’t specifically medical), and from equipment large and small in the clinic. This expansion of potentially useful information also enlarges the set of people who can provide healthcare. Doctors, nurses, and medical-associate professionals will continue to be valued experts, but clinical and community pharmacists, family members, and patients themselves also have important roles to play in this future.
Photo credits: National Cancer Institute
How can healthcare providers extract meaning from this deluge of data? Again, algorithms will be crucial for making sense of dynamic complexity. Think of diagnostic machine learning that rapidly calls attention to a patient’s imaging or wearable data (or a complicated combination of the two), empowering the human healthcare provider to detect the signal buried in the noise.
💡 AI can aid healthcare workers with clinical decision making, drawing their attention to nuances they may have overlooked or reminding them of evidence-based best practices in the massive medical literature.
Importantly, algorithms can relieve healthcare providers from mundane and repetitive tasks, which are major sources of professional burnout. At its best, AI can empower them to focus on complex, unusual, and even highly individual health issues requiring expert creativity that cannot (yet?) be delivered by machine. Bringing the human context back to the forefront of healthcare should improve the patient experience while also fulfilling the passion that draws people to healthcare professions in the first place.
Another way that technology can deliver superpowers is by helping to close the intuition gap. We spend years, even decades internalizing many observations into a framework for how to think about a given problem. Fundamentally, this is what a machine-learning algorithm does: it takes in a lot of data and detects patterns.
💡 Virtual reality and augmented reality visualize the invisible, from atoms and molecules all the way to globe-spanning populations. These technologies can be hugely helpful during medical training for professionals; they also support patient compliance by helping people understand what is happening in their own bodies.
Crucially, VR is a powerful “empathy machine” because it helps close the gap between the lived experiences of individuals such as patients and healthcare providers.
Technology helps us handle complexity, but it tends to drive it, too. All this complexity highlights the benefits of any individual healthcare provider being able to access training across traditional disciplines, and for healthcare teams to value the integration of contributors with diverse interests, educational paths, and personal lived experiences. Algorithms and robotics should both motivate and support ongoing upskilling and reskilling for healthcare providers—hopefully with an element of play that injects a thrill of exploring a new frontier.
Are there important issues about the use of algorithms and robotics in healthcare? Absolutely. Inequality, ethics, privacy, bias, choice, cybersecurity, and cultural sensitivities are all concerns that I have. But I’m heartened by the incredible brainpower and creativity that are being brought to bear on these issues. By blending humility with optimism, we can continue to learn from each misstep and each missed opportunity.
💡 Overall, I believe that we empower all stakeholders in healthcare by adopting a mindset that views technology as an important addition to our humanity—not a replacement for it.
Patients, family members, medical-associate professionals, nurses, and physicians all stand to benefit from people-centered medical technologies. That means that from benchtop (or home office) to bedside, the stories that we tell about technology are as important as the decisions that we make at each step of the technology design-build-test-deploy cycle.
Done right, medical technology does not threaten our humanity. Rather, it can free us to focus on the “care” in healthcare.
Looking for additional reading materials on the future of healthcare? I recommend:
Pharmacist of the Future - Deloitte
Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again - Eric Topol
Move fast and heal things - The Economist
What if an AI won the Nobel Prize for medicine? - The Economist
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