Preparing for the future of pediatric care

Measurement of success is an absolutely inherent part of any technology project and I think there is one single goal that stands out – how did it help the patient? If you keep the patient at the center of attention, the nucleus, then that becomes a yardstick for you to measure success. You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and data gives you the tools for measuring. Unless we measure how we are doing, we cannot be improving. At Phoenix Children’s Hospital we ask ourselves: How can we cure somebody? How can we save a patient’s life? Can we get a patient home earlier? Can we get them back to school? Every single yardstick of success has to be measured with the patient as the center of our attention.

People think that if you have the right IT solution, it should be implemented tomorrow and it will fix everything. However, the technology solution has to be considered as part of the entire ecosystem – the patient, the family, the physician, the provider, their computer awareness, knowledge, and skills. The newer generation of physicians are very adept in the use of new technologies, whereas those belonging to my generation did not grow up with technology and medicine in tandem.

Today, we cannot be dogmatic; we cannot force technology on people. Rather, we have to demonstrate how technology is an enabler of patient care, and then it quickly becomes second nature, just like booking travel via an online website, which is far easier than making multiple calls to the travel agent. If you do it gently, without pressure, without force, and physicians can see that the technology tools are not clashing with what they do, but rather enhancing their practice, then adoption happens naturally, hand in hand with the culture change. But I think we have to recognize that technology is just a tool, and not a panacea for every healthcare challenge.

Those living in the era of horse-drawn carriages could imagine the future in terms of a faster horse-drawn carriage, and only those whose thinking extended beyond this limitation could dream and create the motor car. I see a future where information technology will be ubiquitous. I see personalized medicine being commonplace, spurred by advances in genomics. I can see a tsunami of clinical data, where information is captured not only during clinical encounters in doctors’ offices and hospitals, but also at home and school, at work and play through wearable monitors and sensors. And I dream of the day when all this wealth of information will be seamlessly interconnected to produce meaningful insights that reduce the burden of disease, no matter where you are, to take us to horizons we have never even imagined.

These terms make it sound as if clinical medicine will soon be replaced by artificial robots that would supersede the very human role in diagnosing and treating illness. However, the practice of clinical medicine at its very basis involves careful gathering and analyzing of information from patient’s symptoms, signs, test results and data from multiple sources, an information-processing activity not unlike that of machines processing similar data.

Rather than replacing human clinical judgement, artificial intelligence will augment the clinical acumen to scales that we may not imagine today. Just as autonomous self-driving cars depend upon the power of artificial intelligence to have changed this from a science fiction dream to a reality today, so also will artificial intelligence play a critical role in the medicine of the future, hand in hand with the most amazing supercomputer of all – the human mind. We will see more and more of man plus machine in medicine, rather than man versus machine.