The Pitfalls of Wireless Medicine?

Recently I was at a residency interview where I was asked where I see myself in years from now. I love this question, and a lot of what I spoke of was this new horizon we are seeing with the way medicine is being made more portable or accessible for remote or under served areas. One of the criticisms I received on this topic had to do with how a doctor is only paid for so much of their time and then spends extra unpaid hours doing paperwork. I just nodded consideration, but I didn't understand. The premise of this new digital age of medicine is focused on reducing costs: of course with any new diagnostic or care modality you need to find new ways to secure information but that only creates more jobs while at the same time making the system more amenable to cost cutting and efficiency. Eric Topol is my hero and was heralded as a rockstar of science by GQ magazine- needless to say, the man is "full of win". He's like the Jean Luc Picard of Medicine. And just so that we are all on the same wavelength here, my true feelings about Eric Topol:

+

= awsome

I have links posted on the side to Scripps, etc., and you can read up on him more if you wish on your own. But now to turn to where my interviewer precieved the pitfalls of these new advancements. One of the more fantastic things about this technology is that it can help to eliminate those thousands of dollar per day hospital stays. With remote mointoring and interpretation of data by techs who then send the information to doctors by fax or smart phone- that new "burden" falls on doctors themselves w.r.t charting, and billing for instance. And as she put it, you may only spend 6 hours seeing patients but you'll still have 3 hours of paper work to do afterward. C'est la vie. You can't have the cairrage without the horse to pull it. Of course as the medicine evolves I hope that the renumeration does too but as it stands now, the latter has a lot of catching up to do with the former not to mention security of information concerns.

I'd like to end with an exerpt from an article in The Economist in 2009 talking about health information technology in the form of EHRs and medical software that has vast data gathering potential:

"...Buying a lot of expensive computers is not the answer. As Harvard’s Dr Halamka puts it, “just automating a broken process doesn’t accomplish much.” Indeed, the boffins at the Institute of Medicine reckon that spending on digitisation without connecting it to the organisational culture risks making things worse. Any new HIT systems, they say, must include “cognitive support” that helps doctors and patients make sense of the deluge of medical data that will come their way...One way to do this is to devise software systems that mine data on large numbers of patients with similar illnesses and provide guidance to doctors in real time..."

Here's the link for The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/13437966
Eric speaking at a convention on consumer electronics:
http://www.westwirelesshealth.org/latest-news/videos-ces-2010.html