The Creative Destruction of Medicine - How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care

Eric Topol

Basic Books

2012

320 páginas

10h 40m

ISBN-10: 0465025501

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.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

Digital Medicine

Here is an interesting book by Eric Topol, a renowned cardiologist with a social network presence (I discovered him on Twitter). He starts with a critique of the population-based medicine paradigm and how medicine is resistant to change.

Topol than states the case of a digitized human being, which is essentially representing the patient using data from heterogenous sources such as wireless sensors (from smart phones and smart watches, to patches and so on), genomics, imaging, and electronic medical records. This digitized patient will lead to a personalized/patient-centered medicine, changing drastically the current paradigm. That's the reason of the title 'Creative Destruction', which is a famous expression coined by Joseph Schumpeter.

The book sometimes get too technical and it focuses a lot on genomics (one of the author's favorite topics). For someone outside the medical sciences like me it is a bit difficult to keep track with all the terms.