The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands

✍️ Eric J. Topol

The smartphone is the Gutenberg press of healthcare

This book by Dr. Eric Topol can be seen as the sequel of “The Creative Destruction of Medicine”, where he discusses how advances and cost reduction in technologies like DNA sequencing, sensors and smartphones allowed the so-called digitization of the patient.

In ‘The Patient Will See You Now’, Dr. Topol shows how this digitization will lead to patient empowerment and democratization of medicine. To accomplish this, we need to turn conventional medicine upside down, starting with the asymmetric relationship between doctors and patients. Topol challenges the paternalism in medicine, which can be traced back to Hippocrates and is still alive and well nowadays. He even recalls some episodes where he ‘locked horns’ with the American Medical Association.

Topol advocates that the smartphone will be the cornerstone of patient empowerment and, subsequently, democratization of medicine, hence the bold comparison with the Gutenberg press and the disruption caused by it . Throughout the book he reviews several advances in technology that allowed smartphones to perform a plethora of exams. The book is very rich in references and dozens of articles and journal papers were added to my ‘to-read’ queue.

Two factors contribute to patient empowerment: increased autonomy to perform self-assessment and the fact that all the data is patient-generated and, therefore, shall belong to himself. As Topol states in the book, it will be possible to track the patient from womb to tomb.

It is a very interesting read and we can clearly notice that Topol is on the ‘optimistic side’. Some predictions from the book have not come to fruition (yet!) and others, like Theranos, were not accurate (To be honest, Elizabeth Holmes was able to mislead a lot of smart people).

The book touches in other aspects of medicine such as the introduction of electronic health records, healthcare costs, security/privacy of medical data, and the hospital and doctor visits of the future. Some chapters, as expected, were more USA-centric, but I liked to see to see at least one chapter about low-cost technologies for the developing world.