The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care

✍️ Eric J. Topol

Here is an interesting book by Eric Topol, a renowned cardiologist with a social network presence (I discovered him on Twitter). He starts with a critique of the population-based medicine paradigm and how medicine is resistant to change.

Topol than states the case of a digitized human being, which is essentially representing the patient using data from heterogenous sources such as wireless sensors (from smart phones and smart watches, to patches and so on), genomics, imaging, and electronic medical records. This digitized patient will lead to a personalized/patient-centered medicine, changing drastically the current paradigm. That’s the reason of the title ‘Creative Destruction’, which is a famous expression coined by Joseph Schumpeter.

The book sometimes get too technical and it focuses a lot on genomics (one of the author’s favorite topics). For someone outside the medical sciences like me it is a bit difficult to keep track with all the terms.