May 20, 2009
Body of Medical Knowledge Too Complex for the Human Mind
Written by: John
In a recent comment, Steven suggested that an EMR and HIT in general might be necessary because the volume of medical knowledge is so large and complex that it’s too complex for the human mind. Here’s a short section of his comment:
Another set of reasons to adopt EMR, and sooner rather than later, are the reasons that are beyond the horizon. With the rate of change continuing to accelerate in the health care industry, along with our body of medical knowledge, I see a day where a person’s care plan is simply going to be too complex for a human brain alone to work out all the contributing factors. Sometimes I think we’ve already reached that point and haven’t quite realized it yet.
I absolutely love this concept of the body of medical knowledge being “too complex” for us to work it all out on our own. The idea that we need good clinical decision support systems, EMR and other technology we might not have even developed is really intriguing to me. Reminds me of my previous post about not knowing the true benefits of EMR.
The basic concept being that we won’t know the real benefits of EHR adoption until we have a platform for smart people to be really creative. Think about the Apple iPhone. If you look at the creativity that’s come out of the iPhone platform, it’s amazing. However, we would have never seen all this creativity until the platform was adopted in a broad way.
I believe that being able to managing and delivering all the medical knowledge out there is going to be one of those long term benefits we can’t realize until we have broad EMR adoption.
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4 responses to "Body of Medical Knowledge Too Complex for the Human Mind"
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John,
Thanks for highlighting my comment. Your great post mentions a few of the big ones from a public health perspective. I am not a salesman and this is all “someday” stuff I’m talking about. Someday, we will have real time epidemiology tracking. Someday, hopefully, all of our medical records will be perpetual longitudinal clinical trials for the efficacy and adverse effects of all medication. Someday, individual medication and vaccine batches can be flagged for review or recall in real time, based on the outcomes of those medications.
The reality of the health care industry has been putting pressure on everybody to work at the top of their licenses, because of the sheer amount of things to do and factors to keep track of. That’s now, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Nobody can keep track of more factors than a computer.
I’m thinking also of the ideas being bounced around now about personalized health care and genotype/phenotype specific treatment as genetic research continues to mature. That kind of health care is bound to be incredibly complex and multi-factored.
Also, robots are about to come on the scene in some health care settings, nursing homes foremost, in a big way. Robots “like” to read and write standardized data in standardized formats.
With the potential for great good always comes the potential for great harm. As we develop this technology, we must always put people’s privacy first, and safeguard against immoral, unethical, and illegal uses of this data. Think how major an event it is when the security of your credit card number is breached, how seriously the incident is treated, and how many disclosure rules and regulations there are. That number can be changed in a manner of minutes with a call to your credit card company. That’s a good reference point for thinking about the security and privacy of everyone’s most intimate and permanent medical information.
We could look even further down the horizon, but this post is long enough. All this potential is what motivates me to get out of bed and go to work in the morning.
I think your comment does a great job highlighting the potential of what technology can do and for that matter really has done for healthcare. No doubt we’re going to see some amazing things happen over the next years as technology is applied in healthcare.
The health world of the 21st century is fast-paced. Even in medical practices, speed equals ability to compete, especially when managing information. That is why an electronic medical record system, or EMR, is used by most medical practices.A well written article.
[...] could offer some benefit. I remember a doctor commenting back in 2009 on my blog about how the Body of Medical Knowledge could become to complex for the human mind to process it all. Whether we’re there or yet, is open for debate, but the concept is [...]