“Doctors are considered the most overburdened professionals as they need to get into a patient’s overall health, lifestyle, genetics etc. Each patient has a different body and lifestyle which makes it more difficult to check for the medicine and suggest a better routine. Doctor as a Service can be such a system to help doctors or directly help the patients to have a better life.”
Can technology fill some gaps here?
Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence is filling up a lot of gaps in each profession. Medicine has been a very important domain and requires a lot of attention in today’s world. The latest spread of CoronaVirus is a dangerous phenomenon which can take away a lot of human lives. I will be writing another article on tackling such scenarios later. For now, I would like to see advancement in the current style of prescribing by the doctors.
Today if you visit a doctor, he will ask for your medical history, check the latest diagnostic reports, check your body for symptoms and then go on to prescribe the medicine. This way of prescribing the medicine works perfectly alright when you are suffering from fever, cough, headache or a condition which are general complications. But when it comes to prescribing for chronic diseases like Diabetes, Hypertension, Cardio etc., then a doctor has to do some guesswork or hit and trial before prescribing a long term medication to keep the condition in check. Technology can be of great help here and fill up this gap of guesswork. The current era of ML/AI can take out the guesswork out of the prescription.
How can it be achieved?
We all know that Artificial Intelligence needs data to process and suggest a future scenario. Any ML/AI algorithm which provides 80% accurate results is considered to be mature enough to be applied in real life.
To achieve this, we should first target the medical history of a large number of patients in the last few years. The next step would be to categorize this data as per age, gender, weight, height, physical activity, family history etc. As humans are different, so as their need for medication. With all the advancement in technology, we have also matured enough in Genetics engineering, which can be a sure-shot path for having such a prediction system. Today, a large number of doctors prescribe with their understanding of the other patients. There is no way to look at the gene structure of a patient. Having such important info available with the System can bring a revolution.
What Doctor as a Service bring to the table?
Doctor as a Service will be an important step towards revolutionising the healthcare industry. Doctors are ultimately humans and they do tend to make mistakes which jeopardize the long term health of the patients. If we have such a system in place; then it can suggest medication with better accuracy and fewer side effects.
In a few countries, doctors are biased as well where they prescribe medicine based on the commission they receive. We can keep a check on such practices if we can reduce the human intervention. There are instances where doctors don’t guide patients to do exercise, eat better food. Although, they are very much aware internally that if this patient changes his routine to reach a level of physical activity, then he can get rid of medication. But we see that doctors keep calling such patients to collect fees.
There are places where doctors are not easily available. If Doctor as a Service comes into existence, then it would be easier to provide medical help to the patients. A few African countries can be the most beneficial after the invention of such a system.
“A good physician treats the disease, the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”
Check out more such areas where AI/ML can be implemented –
