Thursday, January 26, 2012

Do We Need Doctors Or Algorithms?

Vinod Khosla; Khosla Ventures, TechCrunch, Jan. 10, 2012

From the article: “…the best solution was to get rid of doctors and teachers and let your computers do the work, 24/7 and with consistent quality…. The history of symptoms, illnesses, and test results could be accessed, processed, and assessed by a computer to see any correlation or trends with the patient’s past. You are the one providing the doctor with the symptoms anyway after all! Any follow-up hunts for clues could again be done with mobile devices. The prescriptions—along with the medical records—could relocate to electronic and digital methods, saving paper, reducing bureaucracy, and easing the healing process. If 90% of the time the doctor knows exactly the right kind of diagnosis from these very few and superficial inputs (we haven’t even considered genetics yet!), does it really require 10+ years of intense education for every diagnostician?"  Read more