Medicine is hard. The human body is extremely complicated, and modern science has not yet identified all of the problems—much the less solutions—that people can face in their lifetimes. Additionally, medicine is practiced by people. And people make mistakes. All the time. No matter how well trained people are, they botch things on occasion.
But what if we gave people less of a role in medicine? What if we made smart machines that were able to diagnose medical problems and perform the appropriate solutions based on vast amounts of data, patient histories, and preprogrammed best practices? Would reducing the amount of human decisions cut down on the amount of medical errors (and thus malpractice)?
Several companies and medical researchers are working on these very questions, and they’ve achieved more than you might realize.
Precision Medicine
Precision medicine has a great deal of buzz at the moment. Precision medicine is not a specific technology. Rather, it is an approach to medicine encompassing many fields and technologies, with one specific goal in mind: using data, technology, and patient records in order to design personalized treatments for every patient.
No two bodies are exactly alike, the thinking goes, so no two treatments should be exactly alike. Goodbye to one-size-fits-all medicine. With doctors treating patients using data this deep and specific, this could be a powerful blow against malpractice.
Precision medicine remains new, but it has gotten huge attention from the medical community. This winter, the White House unveiled a plan to boost research and get the precision medicine ball rolling. We will probably be seeing many of the techniques involved very soon.
Robot Pharmacies
Some medical errors are due to simple bad communication. The handwriting of doctors is notorious. Nurses get confused when sending prescriptions to pharmacists. And sometimes people simply misspeak or mishear.
One emerging solution is the automated pharmacy. Automated pharmacies take decision-making out of the hands of people. So far, things look promising. Hi-tech pharmacies work, aside from the occasional high profile disaster.
Health IT and Diagnostic Errors
According to one major study, over 70% percent of medical errors that led to malpractice suits came from issues of diagnosis. Makes sense, right? When a doctor misidentifies the problem, there’s very little chance that the treatment will be appropriate. How could you possibly cure a cancer when you think it’s a cirrhosis? According to Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard, doctors commonly make flubs as elementary as forgetting to take a patient’s full medical history.
Health information technology could provide a suite of solutions appropriate to this problem. Medical records could be read by machines, not by rushed doctors. Computerized checklists could demand that doctors complete routine checks that could otherwise get forgotten during long days. Better records would be standardised and thus easier to read.
What’s Next?
These three solutions are at the front of medical innovation. All three provide the industry with powerful tools for preventing malpractice. However, all three are fairly recent developments, and bugs are sure to present themselves. In any case, smart minds are on the case, and it is certain that malpractice will soon be less of a problem than it is today.
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