The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care Author: Eric Topol | Language: English | ISBN:
B006NV93U8 | Format: EPUB
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care Description
What if your cell phone could detect cancer cells circulating in your blood or warn you of an imminent heart attack? Mobile wireless digital devices, including smartphones and tablets with seemingly limitless functionality, have brought about radical changes in our lives, providing hyper-connectivity to social networks and cloud computing. But the digital world has hardly pierced the medical cocoon.
Until now. Beyond reading email and surfing the Web, we will soon be checking our vital signs on our phone. We can already continuously monitor our heart rhythm, blood glucose levels, and brain waves while we sleep. Miniature ultrasound imaging devices are replacing the icon of medicine—the stethoscope. DNA sequencing, Facebook, and the Watson supercomputer have already saved lives. For the first time we can capture all the relevant data from each individual to enable precision therapy, prevent major side effects of medications, and ultimately to prevent many diseases from ever occurring. And yet many of these digital medical innovations lie unused because of the medical community’s profound resistance to change.
In The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Eric Topol—one of the nation’s top physicians and a leading voice on the digital revolution in medicine—argues that radical innovation and a true democratization of medical care are within reach, but only if we consumers demand it. We can force medicine to undergo its biggest shakeup in history. This book shows us the stakes—and how to win them.
- File Size: 1527 KB
- Print Length: 322 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0465025501
- Publisher: Basic Books; First Trade Paper Edition, Revised and Expanded edition (December 2, 2011)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B006NV93U8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,851 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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- #1
in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Bioengineering > Biotechnology - #1
in Books > Medical Books > Medical Informatics - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > Biotechnology
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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