This is a website about a website, or more precisely about the possibilities of a website via which individuals have the opportunity to manage their own health.

Now the medical profession with it's vested interest of course would rush headlong at this proposal as to how dangerous this situation would be.

But I want to put forward the argument that such thinking is not only based on this vested self-interest but is outdated by the huge advancements in technology and information networking.

A person in order to become a medical doctors does an enormous amount of study so as to be able to achieve two objectives in medicine.

• Accurate DIAGNOSES; and
• Successful TREATMENT.

The DIAGNOSES is arrived at by using only two components

• Skill; and
• Knowledge

The TREATMENT relies upon applying the same two factors

One of the interesting stories I heard recently in relation to the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is that some of the more unlikely professions that are most likely to disappear, in the not too far distant future, and replaced by AI will include radiographers.

A trials with AI has shown that AI is more effective at accurately determining the results of high-energy investigations than a highly experienced radiographers.

It is the Gomoku story

Let me digress for a minute to talk about the Internet and particularly about Internet websites and more particularly sites like Facebook and Google.

Many of these sites involve a programming language called PHP. This coding program has become one of the most powerful programming languages for use within the Internet. Many of you will be familiar with websites that run entirely of PHP like WordPress.

The reason for this outcome was that PHP is an open source process.That is, anyone can use it for free and anybody can contribute their skills to extending and enhancing its development.

The consequence of which was that tens of thousands of technically competent coders throughout the planet have contributed, now over decades, their time, skill and knowledge to the ongoing advancement of performance and application of this coding language.

Just imagine if this same principle was applied to medicine.

IMAGINE if we could use AI to capture and apply the skill and knowledge of all the most competent physicians in the planet and incorporate this into a website - say Dr.Me.

Okay, now I see it's time for the medical profession to push back.

They (the medical profession) might, at a long stretch, concede it may be okay for diagnosis only BUT there are some diseases in which surgery is required and for that you still need the active involvement of another party and that's a good point, one which we will get to later on but let's address first the concept of an 'interactive diagnostic web site'.

Let's acknowledge that there might not be for 100% of the time, that this website can deliver the best outcome for you in relation to you taking full control over your health but let's just make an assumption, say that perhaps 90% of your visits to a doctor do not require surgery and only usually require the following components.

1. The collection of data in relation to the symptoms that you present with
2. The forming of an opinion as to what the likely candidates could be for the production of those symptoms
3. Maybe then the necessity of pathology or radiology or any other ....olgy, to narrow the field
4. The collation of all the data to assist ...
   1. The determination of the most likely cause ; and then advice as to ...
   2. most likely effective treatment/remedy availability; and finally
5. The prognoses
   

So, here we can use the facilities of a Dr Me type website for those 90% of times.

Of course the process will most likely starts with an extensive interrogation.

Certainly commence by requiring you to provide data input in the form of commentary.

It might then even require you to undertake some simple onsite tests yourself using basic technology like

• body temperature and
• blood pressure

and enter those values in the appropriate locations.

Then using the huge power of modern technology including AI the interaction between the website and you can continue until the technology is satisfied that it has a reliable answer.

At that stage it will provide you with advice which may include providing you with instructions as to what other data it requires in order to continue with its analysis.

To this end it may for example need pathology tests data to be obtained and it will advise you as to what and where you can gather this data. It could for instance provide the facility to select a pathology laboratory from a drop down menu and instantly e-mail that material to the laboratory to arrange this activity and even accommodate the receival back of their response.

It could easily provide you with an appointment time as to where and when you can attend to provide the required specimens or instruction for self collection of the sample yourself (poo for example) including all relevant information {exactly the same as would be provided (in theory/expectation) currently by a p(hysical)-doctor}.

As soon as the analysis of the pathology is completed the lab can return the results to you via e-mail (or download the data directly into window on the website) at which time you would be prompted to continue the consultation on the website.

Eventually it will provide you with an outcome

Say for example a prescription, which can be emailed to a pharmacy.

You then could received an e-mail back with the time and place to collect the product.

For a non-urgent cases you could even have the medication h(ard)-mailed (postie in old speak English) ) to you at your g(eographic)-address.

There is a very strong argument for the use of this approach to medicine to effectively filter out non-urgent/routine situations from urgent/serious ones needed for medical attention.

Would the system be 100% fail-safe/flawless?

Hell no! There are no 100%. I mean, if we can't be 100% certain about when a person should be declared dead and if we can't be certain about that then why would we expect it to be so in any other arena.

Is the current system fail safe/flawless?

Well hell no! If you wish to ferret around you'll find just how much error, miscalculations, mistakes, misdiagnosis oversight etcetera occur within the existing one.

However you can be reasonably certain, based on what we know about the development of AI, that you could safely speculate your investment funds into a bet that eventually this system will produce a better outcome than the existing one - at a fraction of the cost.

But of course there is politics - which will get to eventually.

This is the system that currently operates - by phone

1. Contact a medical clinic for an appointment to see a doctor. (At the medical clinic that I attend requires a wait of almost 4 weeks to see a doctor of choice
2. If the condition is reasonably urgent you may be able to see a randomly chosen doctor within a day or two
3. If it is more urgent/serious then you will be directed to an emergency department of a hospital
   

If we look at the statistics in relation to medicine we will see that the vast majority of dispensation of the practice of medicine is to do with the more routine and general aspects of the functioning of our biology.

A Dr Me website could certainly right now cater for a large range of medical conditions by self-directed medical management using the application and utilisation of the vast information banks and the information technology currently available to support the concept.

So there now that brings us to surgery and yes it looks like surgeons are safe for the time being BUT when we see surveyors arguing about millimeters in relation to geographical locations arrived at by spatial technology and the time industry ever shaving the units of time into billionth of a second and the ease at which smart bombs can locate targets, significantly distanced from their point of release, it won't be a long time before the technology arrives that allows AI and robotics to more skillfully located and manipulate parts of the human anatomy, than can ever be achieved by the most skilled of surgeons.

The system could be so good that it could filter out much of the current demand on the medical industry both in human resources and money that has been engineered into the current process, by the needs to defend vested interests via the nature of politics.

The future is here, commitment is the only missing ingredient.

For a consideration of the politics for Dr.Me see my take on Stupid Humans

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Warren Bolton