Health care could use a dose of tech
AUSTIN — Most of us don’t want a robot for a doctor, but everyone should want our human doctor to have a robotic assistant.
Researchers release more than 10,000 medical studies a year, but doctors take a decade to adopt many of these newly developed best practices because they don’t have time to keep up, studies show.
The internet, electronic health records and artificial intelligence can help doctors make correct diagnoses and make better decisions. And that is just one way that technology can make health care more efficient, more accurate and less costly.
“We’re probably 25 years behind everyone else in how we’re leveraging tech,” said Dr. Andrew Pendley, director of the emergency medicine department at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. He and dozens of other health care professionals spoke at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin last week.
For years now, I’ve listened to doctors, mostly older people, complain about laws requiring them to keep electronic health records. And while some companies have made a hash of the new software, the potential to improve patient care is unparalleled, especially in a system as complex, and at times dehumanizing, as ours.
“I saw a lot of the inefficiencies in our own hospital, not only in the processes, but also the ineffectual communication” said Dr. Lance Watson,
emergency department director at Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City, explaining why he’s embraced new technology. “I think a lot of times the patient can get lost.”
If employed properly, electronic health records provide a top-to-bottom view of a person’s health and medical history. Whenever a provider adds more information, the picture becomes complete and can more easily be shared among specialists.
When millions of these records are anonymously collated, researchers can gain insights. By applying artificial intelligence, computers can take those insights and send them back to the doctor holding the computer tablet in the exam room.
The doctor can receive a pop-up message, for example, that says in 87 percent of cases like this one, the correct diagnosis is a chemical imbalance in the blood and can be cured with a medication. Or the artificial intelligence may warn a doctor against prescribing a drug that would interact poorly with one prescribed by another doctor.
Studies show that 30 percent of health care costs are attributable to unnecessary tests, physician error and other wasteful practices. This is not surprising, since the average doctor makes between 8,000 and 12,000 decisions a day, causing decision fatigue.
“We’re probably not as good as doctors in the 10th hour of our shift as when we started,” Watson said.
Artificial intelligence, though, never gets tired.
Research is also demonstrating how virtual reality can help patients overcome pain and anxiety as well as learn new behaviors and improve their health.
Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles has found that patients reported 25 percent less pain when they used virtual reality to escape what Dr. Brennan Spiegel calls the psycho-social jail cell of the hospital room.
“We had a control group that watched a two-dimensional video instead of an immersive virtual reality experience, and that also worked, but not as much as the virtual reality,” Spiegel said. “If VR is a therapy, then we need a VR pharmacy, and that’s something we’re working on.”
Doctors have seen the greatest benefits from VR, so far, in treating mental health issues. Companies are developing tools for autistic children to better understand their world, and there are now artificial therapists that interact with clients and encourage them to see human doctors.
Psychologists have used primitive VR systems to treat phobias, such as fear of heights or flying, for decades with great success. More realistic VR experiences are now used to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, not only from combat, but also from sexual assault.
“The technology has finally caught up with the vision of applying it for clinical purposes,” said Skip Rizzo, director of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California’s Department of Psychiatry.
Doctors, administrators and insurance companies, though, remain the biggest obstacles to greater adoption, every expert agreed.
Lobbyists for doctors have tried to convince me for years to condemn electronic health record requirements, complaining that doctors have better things to do than interact with computers. What’s needed, though, are tools to help doctors leverage technology more effectively.
Rather than lecture about the good old days of medical arts, we need doctors to leverage computer science to apply evidence-based treatments and double-check a doctor’s work. We would not only get better outcomes, but save money, too.
Chris Tomlinson is the Chronicle’s business columnist. chris.tomlinson@chron.com twitter.com/cltomlinson