Black Bags to Robots: 100 Years of Medical Progress

Posted 28 July, 2007 in future tech

There was once a time when doctors did house calls^*. Then a population boom, decreasing physician/patient ratios and new hospital technologies largely obsoleted personal house visits. For the past 50 years, nearly all contact with one’s physician has occurred in a doctor’s office. Recently, EHR patient portal software has allowed email and instant chat with physicians. Some EHRs now even have live video conferencing/telemedicine capabilities (which are particular handy in a corrections environment, for example.) Increasingly, remote medical encounters (with robots) are enabling a specialist to operate from the other side of the country or world.

I think that remote medicine is particularly exciting because it allows the mechanical motions of the procedure to be recorded for review. Previously, procedures could be video recorded, but now every movement and pressure and cut can all be saved and analyzed for best practices and training.

As well, once the operation data is stored, it can be combined with outcomes data to find useful trends and patterns. How’s that for cool?

* Just yesterday I heard that some doctors are beginning again to make house calls, in an effort to curb expensive emergency room visits.