I’m a thought leader?

Today a media team from a Fortune 50 company asked for my “thought leadership” on the future of technology in medicine — which definitely didn’t trigger my impostor syndrome (sarcasm). Nevertheless, I wrote down some thoughts. Maybe some of these thoughts are even leaders. Or am I the leader of the thoughts?…. Anyway:

Technology will

• predict bad outcomes before they happen and suggest how to prevent them.

• allow us to use a patient’s own baseline data to tell if something good or bad is happening or is about to happen to them (often called “precision medicine”).

• make sure care is escalated (e.g., moving to an intensive care unit) and de-escalated (e.g., leaving an intensive care unit or going home) only when appropriate,

  • even predicting and preventing some of those escalations.

  • making sure no one is staying longer than they really need to or leaving earlier than they really should.

  • which would be really useful in a situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic where ICUs were overcrowded and clinicians overworker.

• allow physicians to focus on more complicated situations and contexts by automating the “worrying” about simpler, rules-based metrics.

• consider more complex combinations of signals than a human brain can and provide just-in-time information based on those combinations.

• extend the window information a physician has beyond a single encounter.

For more concrete examples from an actual medical expert, I recommend the book Deep Medicine by Eric Topol.