Stop carping, doctors: join the tech Reformation
There is a Reformation under way in the world of healthcare. Information once jealously guarded by an elite, in a language few understand, is being democratised and demystified. You either celebrate that – or you are a doctor.
For which patient will not profit from the real-time analysis and personalised treatment that is on our doorstep? Who does not cheer the extraordinary impact, in access, diagnosis and productivity, of the digital information revolution upon medicine? The Royal College of Surgeons, that’s who.
Richard Kerr, consultant neurosurgeon, is the RCS’s doom-monger in chief. This week millions clamoured to hear the latest about Apple’s new iPhone (which includes a fall sensor for the frail), and the gadget-crazy new Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, promised to embrace technologies that improve life for NHS patients. But Mr Kerr was unenthused. All this tech, and the info it produces, he warned, is going to send hypochondriacs into “hyperdrive”. Medics already driven to distraction by diagnoses from Doctor Google, he laments, ain’t seen nothing yet.
It’s an immensely depressing reaction for a brace of reasons. One, it confirms the gruesome suspicion that the medical profession is, despite protestations, institutionally resistant to innovation, because doctors’ primary instinct is to protect not patient health but their own established authority as the high priests of wellbeing.
For them, then, the greatest ill is always change – whether that be the establishment of the NHS (fiercely resisted by the BMA) or the widespread dissemination, on smart phones, watches and trackers, of easily comprehensible health data.
The second reason to despair is because it is actually the very doctors Mr Kerr insists are going to be overwhelmed by terrified patients who will be among the biggest beneficiaries of advancing technology. All the form filling they moan about? That’s going to be gone. Instead of laboriously typing in details after every consultation, doctors will soon find it done automatically by voice recognition systems picking out what is important to record. They’ll still be in charge, checking things over, but liberation from routine will be at hand.
To do what? To bloody well get back to what they always say is most important – the patient. So if you are a doctor and find discussing information from the “worried well” a chore, then boy are you in the wrong job. Demographics dictate we’re financially doomed unless we move much of healthcare from curing sickness to preventing it. But that means both doctors and patients accepting that consultations are not failures if they do not end in the confirmation of illness.
Rather, in the new world, confirmation of wellness will be the badge of success; chronic sickness the humiliating failure, because the information will have been there to intervene.
Big tech companies get a lot of stick, and rightly so, because too often they treat our data like theirs, subjecting it to unintelligible processes. But that is a trick our medical high priests have been playing since time immemorial. The irony is that in this Reformation, it is technology that will tear down medicine’s rood screen. The cries of heresy are all too predictable. FOLLOW Harry de Quetteville on Twitter @harrydq;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion