Technology and Medical Innovation

Hanson’s The Edge of Medicine touches on many pertinent issues in the increasing importance of technology and medical innovation in our healthcare system. Some rhetoricians have the belief that even though Americans may not have access to universal healthcare, American medical innovation continues to make our system one of the best in the world. Whether or not this is true is disputable, but Hanson’s timely and optimistic book shows that technology and research are vital to the practice of providing healthcare in this country. Some may argue that this comes at the expense of humane patient treatment, but Hanson shows that technology may be incorporated in a way that actually benefits patient care.

One case in which this is true is his exposition on the growing number of laparoscopic surgery. These surgeries are less invasive and quicker than traditional surgeries, and probably improve the doctor-patient rapport as a result. In addition, electronic medical records are a godsend for many hospitals and clinics that would otherwise have to juggle easily damageable paper records. Of course, EMRs raise questions of privacy and are also not foolproof, but they represent a way in which medical innovation has been not just physical or on a biological level, but organizational as well. Overall, technology has been the driving force in improving patient care—although we cannot let it draw a veil over the importance of maintaining humanism in medicine and extending the benefits of that technology to every citizen in this country.

However, the increasing amount of technology raises the question of whether computer-run machines and “intelligent algorithms” will one day render people obsolete. This is most evident in Hanson’s description of Tug, an affable little robot who can deliver drugs to patients’ rooms, performing the same task that would ordinarily be done by a human. Thus, technology has profound economic implications that I think are not unlike those encountered in the Industrial Revolution, when artisans found themselves being outmatched by machines that were more accurate, more reliable, and less likely to complain. In addition, doctors may struggle to keep up with all the new medical techniques (see http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/313/7064/1062) or may even find their diagnostic powers being challenged by an algorithm that can weight patients’ symptoms against illnesses.

Medicine truly continues to evolve before our very eyes. In face of the intersection between medicine, technology, and science, it is obvious that medicine will only continue to advance technologically as new scientific discoveries can be applied. However, I find it interesting that Hanson did not devote more attention to the relative paucity of funding for pioneering medical technologies. In addition, it seems that technology affects different specialties and different practices to varying degrees. I wonder if it has increased the divide between various specialties because of the increasingly specialized information that a doctor in that particular field would need to stay up-to-date on.