Machine learning and artificial intelligence are some of the emerging healthcare technologies that Bert Mandelbaum, MD, is eager to follow.
Dr. Mandelbaum, co-chair of medical affairs at Cedars-Sinai Kerlan Jobe Institute in Los Angeles spoke on the "Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" about the technology he's watching and why he's worried about healthcare becoming "institutionalized."
This is an excerpt. Listen to the full podcast here.
Question: What are you most excited about today, and what makes you nervous?
BM: There's so many exciting technologies in evolution. These are technologies that have evolved like Moore's Law, as we've gotten better at developing our abilities with the computer technology and more resistors, we can now in a very exponential way and more expediently develop new technologies. I'm very excited about those technologies including 3D-printing, virtual reality with augmented reality, the use of biologics on every level and how we approach big data. I think it is so exciting developing machine learning and artificial intelligence with multiple simulations and learning a lot more than we've ever known before. I think that the abundance of that kind of data should make us all excited because we're going to learn more in a very exponential way that we haven't done in the past.
What makes me nervous is that we will continue to institutionalize and de-professionalize physicians and the context that they have in patient care. What makes medicine great is the contact point between doctors and patients. We've taken the Hippocratic Oath. The patient comes first and we have to have focus and discipline to keep that in mind at all times. Sometimes what happens is we institutionalize medicine and we think about the numbers of patients' lives, of the complexities of patient population, that we really forget about the patient who is really the center of this. So everything we need to do should be and needs to continue to be patient-centric and consumer-centric focusing on their health. But what makes me really nervous is that we lose that focus and discipline, and that's what we have to continue to discover, integrate and learn in our young physicians going forward.