Deep Medicine with Dr. Eric Topol

The way we practice medicine today is broken. We prioritize the business and treat the patient as nothing more than a cog in our great machine. According to today’s guest, ” we have an emotional breakdown, with disenchanted patients largely disconnected from burned-out, depressed doctors.” Dr. Eric Topol calls this epidemic “shallow medicine”. It’s driven by runaway healthcare costs and an insatiable drive for increased efficiency and profits, and unfortunately, is largely the way we deliver healthcare today. Because of this, Topol says, “patients exist in a world of insufficient data, insufficient time, insufficient context, and insufficient presence.” But, Dr. Topol is optimistic. He believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI), while still finding its place in medicine, and still mostly unproven in real-world clinical situations, can create the space we need to change course. In his new book, Deep Medicine, Dr. Topol makes an optimistic, but realistic argument for how artificial intelligence can make healthcare human again. He tells us that it’s early, and this is definitely a race with no finish line, but we’ve seen great progress so far and there’s plenty of evidence that the tools will have a profound impact on every part of healthcare. Dr. Topol believes that we will get there, and that AI will create new efficiencies and workflows that can be used to either make things really good, or really bad. He tells us that “the increased efficiency and workflow could either be used to squeeze clinicians more, or the gift of time could be turned back to patients – to use the future to bring back the past.” On this episode, Dr. Topol explains his thesis and we explore the potential paths from where we are now, to where we might go. Dr. Topol makes a compelling case for breaking that inertia and putting the priority back on the patient. For full show notes, link and bios, visit https://thehcbiz.com/deep-medicine-eric-topol/