Dr. House will yield to Deep Mind

"Dr. House will yield to Deep Mind".

I chuckled at this quip from Dr. Ran Balicer's 2016 TEDxTelAviv talk, "Medicine transformed: the algorithm will see you now." Dr. Balicer is one of the speakers whose talks I want to see at HIMSS 2023. Not just because of his innovative work focusing on data-driven preventative medicine but – after seeing this talk – because of his views on the changing role and value of physicians.

Don't misunderstand me – the ability to often detect chronic kidney disease years before symptoms present is a massive victory in individual, institutional, and societal terms. Early treatment gives patients a vastly improved quality of life, sparing them from the pain and suffering of dialysis or kidney transplant. These treatments are also expensive. In the US, for example, roughly 500,000 people with severe kidney disease require daily dialysis at a cost of over $10,000 a month.

However, as we enter an age of AI-assisted healthcare, it's extremely important to construct a healthy new archetype for physicians. At least this is what I, as a patient, believe and hope for.

As Dr. Balicer frames it, "Our profession as doctors is about to be truly disrupted. The days of the knowing-all doctor relying on their clinical intuition are all but over. Machines are already doing much of this in an extremely precise manner and will override clinical intuition very soon. The art of medicine is not in precision, it is not in the deduction skills that will be the key, it is in the humane part of health care in caring for our patients and partnering with them to figure out the right path for them among

many precise options."