How Technology Will Allow Us to Downsize Health Care and Win the War for the Allies
With Dialogue and Everything
The CBS Evening News recently ran a story about a hospital with robots that allow physicians to perform rounds remotely over the Internet. With a video screen on the top that displays a real-time image of the doctor's face, the robot can be used to interact remotely with patients and hospital staff. Doctors only need the joystick, software and requisite login credentials to move one of the five-foot-tall, 200-pound DocBots around the hospital, onto elevators, into patient rooms and presumably across the parking lot and onto the golf course.
This bold advancement in technology opens a broad frontier for the practice of MedicineTM.* Imagine a day when the finest specialists in the world could be consulted not only after long journeys or by exchanging volumes of records, but where through a simple login procedure the very best minds available could be (virtually) right there in your hospital room or public clinic. Time and lives could be saved, not to mention reducing health care costs as facilities across the nation realize they no longer need to keep actual "practitioners" on staff full-time.
To say nothing of those high-demand specialties like cardiovascular physicians, oncologists and thoracic surgeons. In this brave new world of automated health care, a single surgeon could perform five or six operations simultaneously. All that would be required is enough bandwidth and a ready supply of community college graduates with the requisite vocabulary and dexterity.
But this automation of health care on a local scale is just the beginning. If the public and political will exists, these same robots could be controlled from a single location. Imagine with me a place where the greatest medical minds in the world are gathered in a massive control center. Lights dimmed and pagers on vibrate, highly skilled ministers of healing review CAT scans, x-rays, EKGs and video taped patient interviews on giant screens like the ones they have in those sports bars that let the bartender zoom in on one image and make the others smaller around the edges. The doctors have keyboards on the armrests of their reclining leather chairs that allow them to consult with other doctors (sometimes in the same room!) and call up dosage/weight graphs, family histories and the latest poll results.
The system I propose also could alleviate many professional liability issues. Imagine the poor ambulance chaser forced to interrogate (via videolink) a surgeon practicing his love on patients all over the contiguous 48 states:
Evil Trial Lawyer:
Dr. Musbarker, exactly how many cardiac bypass procedures would you say you have performed in the last five years.
Dr. Musbarker:
Well, it's hard to say exactly. How many have there been?
Evil Trial Lawyer:
The Washington Times reports that 267,574 were performed in the United States during that period.
Dr. Musbarker: All of them.
Good luck finding a plaintiff's expert witness in that scenario.
But do we really need a large team of physicians making these diagnoses and performing these procedures? Surely there is one best medical mind to whom (which?) we all can turn for the BEST advice and treatment.
Here is my proposal. This central control room should be located in our nation's capital. Specifically, it should be on Constitution Avenue, in the office of Senatordoctor Bill Frist. Soon Americans of any station in life can forget about co-payments, scheduling appointments and bothersome preventative care. Just step right up to kiosk in your local mall. Have that boil lanced by remote control. You could even prop grandma up in front of the screen at the PigglyWiggly before you let her waste too many of those private account dollars on green bananas.
I feel better already.
*Medicine is trademark of Columbia HCA
