Unrealistic medicine
There is perhaps too much Machine learning/AI hype in this article — or at least for my taste, but it is well worth a read. The problem the authors are grappling with is perhaps the central intellectual problem modern medicine faces: how formal can our methods become? And how can we use a variety of cognitive prostheses to guide clinical behaviour.
Asking doctors to work harder or get smarter won’t help. Calls to reduce “unnecessary” care fall flat: we all know how difficult it’s become to identify what care is necessary. Changing incentives is an appealing lever for policymakers, but that alone will not make decisions any easier: we can reward physicians for delivering less care, but the end result may simply be less care, not better care.
Informatics — using the term in the broadest possible sense — and the management of expertise, is the central challenge facing medicine and medical care. It is where the action should be. The authors are right about this, but their caution is also true: “The state of our health care system offers little reason for optimism.” Amen. And spare me ‘realistic medicine’.