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Our interactions with our technology vendors go much deeper than simple business relationships.”
Vinay Vaidya, M.D.
Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer
Phoenix Children's Hospital, Phoenix, AZ
People think that if you have the right IT solution, it should be implemented tomorrow and it will fix everything. However, the technology solution has to be considered as part of the entire ecosystem – the patient, the family, the physician, the provider, their computer awareness, knowledge, and skills. The newer generation of physicians are very adept in the use of new technologies, whereas those belonging to my generation did not grow up with technology and medicine in tandem.
Today, we cannot be dogmatic; we cannot force technology on people. Rather, we have to demonstrate how technology is an enabler of patient care, and then it quickly becomes second nature, just like booking travel via an online website, which is far easier than making multiple calls to the travel agent. If you do it gently, without pressure, without force, and physicians can see that the technology tools are not clashing with what they do, but rather enhancing their practice, then adoption happens naturally, hand in hand with the culture change. But I think we have to recognize that technology is just a tool, and not a panacea for every healthcare challenge.
These terms make it sound as if clinical medicine will soon be replaced by artificial robots that would supersede the very human role in diagnosing and treating illness. However, the practice of clinical medicine at its very basis involves careful gathering and analyzing of information from patient’s symptoms, signs, test results and data from multiple sources, an information-processing activity not unlike that of machines processing similar data.
Rather than replacing human clinical judgement, artificial intelligence will augment the clinical acumen to scales that we may not imagine today. Just as autonomous self-driving cars depend upon the power of artificial intelligence to have changed this from a science fiction dream to a reality today, so also will artificial intelligence play a critical role in the medicine of the future, hand in hand with the most amazing supercomputer of all – the human mind. We will see more and more of man plus machine in medicine, rather than man versus machine.
People say data is the new gold or data is the new oil. I would go a bit further than that and say that data is the new life-saving drug."
Vinay Vaidya, M.D.
Vice President and Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Phoenix Children's Hospital
There's always a way to make life better.
DISCLAIMER:
Results are specific to the institution where they were obtained and may not reflect the results achievable at other institutions.