The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care Author: Eric Topol M.D. | Language: English | ISBN:
0465061834 | Format: PDF
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care Description
Now with a new postscript covering the unfolding health care revolution
Mobile technology has transformed our lives, and personal genomics is revolutionizing biology. But despite the availability of technologies that can provide wireless, personalized health care at lower cost, the medical community has resisted change. In The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Eric Topol—one of the nation’s top physicians—calls for consumer activism to demand innovation and the democratization of medical care. The Creative Destruction of Medicine is the definitive account of the coming disruption of medicine, written by the field’s leading voice.
- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books; First Trade Paper Edition, Revised and Expanded edition (August 13, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0465061834
- ISBN-13: 978-0465061839
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
For a book that has pages of endorsements from key authors and influential physicians, this book fails to meet the expectations - particularly in defining remarkably new disruptive ideas. Despite an excellent set-up and problem definition, this book ends up reading like a well-organized collection of articles from magazines such as Wired.
The premise of Topol is a compelling one - the developments and the relative maturity of mobile devices, PCs, Internet, genome sequencing and social media, provides a potential inflection point in the field of medicine. In the initial chapters that borrows heavily from themes established by Clay Shirky (for example, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, and those similar to ones defined in Hamlet's BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age and The Third Screen: Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile, Topol abstracts 4 key trends (4 C's) that are setting up the stage for the "Ds" - destructive trends. While the ideas themselves are not new, Topol condenses the ideas from various authors to clearly characterize the innovation potential in medicine. Topol also makes some astute observations on the use of guidelines and the limitations of population-based clinical trials. While this first part alone is worth the book, the rest of the book fails to live up to the excellent framing.
Dr. Eric Topol's book is an excellent review of what the promise of technology holds for the US Healthcare system. His background as a geneticist and a cardiologist as well as a highly regarded research scientist informs this book with the promise of the future, and it is the near future at that. Not something decades away. The advent of the empowered patient (by technology as close as their cell phone) extends the opportunity and methodology for significant reductions in the cost of health care for us all---without a reduction in quality. For instance, cell phones with a "lab on a chip" enabling individuals to substantially reduce the cost and compliance of monitoring one's blood work for glucose, cholesterol, etc. while empowering the patient to be more aware and in control.
His review of genetics was a little dense, but as readers we must all bear in mind how difficult it is to condense such a complex subject into a chapter of one book providing enough information for the lay person to become excited about the possibilities in front of us without speaking totally over our heads. The promise of pharmacogenomics is here today. Enabling an oncologist to test a cancer tumor for genetic markers that indicate which of several chemotherapy drugs would be most efficacious for a particular patient. The "wrinkle" in the system is that insurance company awareness and subsequent payments are running behind the speeding train of "Star Trek" medicine. I do believe we will as a society work this out.
As a health care professional, I highly recommend this book for nurses, physicians, administrators as well as interested lay people. There are so many cost pressures coming with health care reform, it is easy to get caught up in thinking that quality of care is doomed to decline.
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