Eleven  Factors  Impacting Physicians in Transition to Information Age

We now live in the Information  Age.  Computers, algorithms, and apps  are transforming society and dramatically  altering  politics ,  government,  the economy,  and its institutions.

 Many online  forces  are  at work.

Just this week, a political outsider, Donald Trump,  broke  the Republican Party’s lock  on its conservative base,  using frequent tweets to make his case;  a socialist candidate, Bernard Sanders,  won another primary against Hillary Clinton,  partly by raising more money than she on the Web;  and the New York Times,  announced it lost money  last quarter due to ads lost to online competitors. 

On the health care front,  ObamaCare again failed to live up to expectations,  partly because of  healthcare.gov  stumbles and  partly due to  failures of electronic medical records to make health care more interoperative and easier to use and access.

IT Reshaping Health Care

The cybereconomy is  reshaping health care.  IT helps us better understand complex systems and their interrelationships.  IT disperses care to multiple locations. IT allows radiologic images to be interpreted anywhere in the world. IT fosters entrepreneurship and permits more people to work independently.  And,  to some extent, IT replaces pattern recognition by human with pattern recognition by machines.

Here are eleven  ways the information revolution  impacts physicians and requires their participation.

1.        It crunches data to offer  better diagnosis and treatment by keeping track of patient histories,  helping doctors keep up with the literature, and analyze  treatment options.

2.      It helps  doctors communicate with their patients – individually  and to their total patient base.

3.      It links doctors with other doctors,  primarily  through electronic  health records.

4.      It connects doctors with patients at a distance – with wearable devices,  medical consultations,  SKPE evaluations,  and  monitoring  patients on foot, at work, and in bed.

5.      It helps  patients stay healthy  with vital sign recording,  calorie counting, and heart rhythm monitoring.

6.      It helps  doctors educate patients and  market the availability of their services  and their expertise 

7.      It  empowers concierge medicine practitioners by allowing doctors to remain independent  yet have access to the latest information on the Net.

8.     It offers decision support systems.

9.      It  fosters collaboration and cooperation between medical specialists  within and outside of institutional settings.

10.   It makes possible such apps as the instant medical history .  tested and widely used software allows patients to record their history, complaints,  symptoms  before seeing the doctor, thereby saving the doctor 6-10 minutes per patient by helping the doctor zero in on problems.

11.   Major projects -   the government’s $29 billion EHR initiative,  M.D. Anderson’s Moon Shots,  IBM’s Watson investments,  Silicon Valley’s  Health 2.0 programs – rely on information technologies and physician input.