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Overview

We’ve all gone through the routine of waiting in a doctor’s office for hours, which increases our chances of getting sicker. Then, when we finally get to see the doctor and receive treatment, it usually takes more than 15 minutes and is expensive. That’s only if we live in an area that has easy access to doctors.

But this doesn’t have to be our future. New technology is changing the way medicine is practiced and who is able to do it. It’s leading to a power shift in the medical industry, so let’s take a look into what that future looks like.

New technology is decreasing the need for hospitals. An app can help you avoid a trip to the dermatologist, and mobile phones are improving health care in developing countries.

Big Idea #1: Smartphones allow greater access to medical information and will soon give patients much more power to diagnose themselves.

Smart phones have changed the way people live. They provide easy access to a lot of information and are available to nearly everyone in the world. People can use them for many things, including medicine, which will be greatly changed by smart phone technology.

Smartphones will soon make autonomous medicine possible, that is, they’ll allow people to diagnose themselves. We already have some tools for it, such as the app SkinVision.

SkinVision is an app that allows users to send photos of their skin lesions to a doctor, who can determine whether they’re benign or not.

And photos are just the beginning. Microscopic scans will soon have such powerful zooms that we’ll be able to scan ourselves for certain types of bacteria. Tuberculosis is diagnosed by checking a sputum sample for the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Soon, anyone with a smartphone will be able to test themselves for tuberculosis.

Smartphones have the potential to change public health in Africa. In 2010, there were 1.1 doctors and nurses per 1,000 inhabitants in sub-Saharan African countries. In the United States, that figure was 12.3. Mobile connections also provide people with greater access to health information; 93 million Africans had smartphones in 2013 (out of a total population of 630 million). Projects like Masiluleke send millions of text messages every day encouraging people to get checked for HIV/AIDS.

Smartphones can do more than just make phone calls. For example, Nanobiosym recently developed a tiny chip that can diagnose diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis for much cheaper than the market price.

Big Idea #2: Technology will shift power from doctors to patients.

In the modern medical world, patients have grown accustomed to following their doctors’ orders. But this will change in the future. Doctors have long been considered all-powerful authorities of medicine. In fact, even Hippocrates, the Ancient Greek philosopher, said that physicians should conceal information from patients for their own good. Medical students still recite the Hippocratic Oath, which states that only people who’ve sworn by it should be trusted with medical knowledge. Recently developed standards still echo this sentiment, like the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics, which states that physicians are allowed to treat patients against their consent if that consent would be medically contraindicated – or unhealthy for them.

Doctors still have the final say in a patient’s treatment. Patients don’t determine their own treatments and most follow orders without question.