Primary Care Is So Over

There are close to a quarter million primary care physicians in the U.S., more than any other individual specialty, and about half the total number of all specialists combined. Yet, somehow, primary care seems to lack the power and social influence necessary to chart its own professional course. As the availability and granularity of specialist physicians increased, the value proposition of a generalist primary care doctor seems to have become unclear to those who pay for medical services and to physicians as well. As a result, primary care medicine was forced to price itself lower than specialized medicine, and now it is being forced to compete with a variety of other business models. Primary care seems to be experiencing an identity crisis, unable to decide if it is the cornerstone of medicine, or an antiquated service whose time has passed.

What is primary care?

The primary care name itself can be understood in two very different ways, depending on how you translate the word primary. It could be seen as the first step one needs to take when engaging with the medical system, a step followed by secondary care, tertiary care, etc. This is the gatekeeping view, where primary care doctors apply their knowledge to direct patients to appropriate specialized resources, if necessary. Since there could be multiple specialized resources, and since medicine is very complex, the gatekeeper doctor is also tasked with follow up, coordination and general supervision. In the business world, this job is known as project management, and it is usually filled by workers that need not be expert at anything other than management of tasks and resources.

Another way to look at primary care is to assert that it is the central and predominant type of medical care, or the way most medical care is provided. In this model, the primary care physician is expected to treat and resolve all but the most unusual medical problems, which may from time to time require a consult with a specialized resource. A consult is not the same as a transfer of care. This type of practice requires that the primary care physician has more knowledge and more understanding of the patient than all transient specialists put together. And this type of super doctor cannot be either underpaid or easily replaced. Unfortunately, short of some old timers here and there, nobody practices primary care quite this way anymore.

There are many reasons why medicine developed into an essentially fragmented model of care. The often touted explosion in medical knowledge, beyond what one human can accumulate and apply, is probably not as instrumental here as money and power seem to be. There are only a handful of diseases that make life miserable for most people, and eventually kill us all, and data shows that most medical resources are spent on a tiny percentage of people at any given time. It is difficult to reconcile these realities with the assertion that we need hundreds of thousands of highly specialized resources, because no one doctor can master the intricacies of a few run of the mill diseases occurring over and over across the board, and seriously affecting only a minority of patients. This, by the way, should not be confused with the obvious need for having a great variety of specialized research in academic and industry settings.

Whatever else it might be, primary care is a $100 billion per year industry in complete disarray. In addition to its own revenues, primary care as it stands today, heavily influences the flow of revenues in all other health care sectors. This should explain rather nicely why so many businesses are trying to be part of it, trying to reform it, reinvent it, flip it, control it, or just replace it. What practically all these innovations have in common is a tacit agreement to adopt the lighter definition of what primary care consists of, for the very simple reason of reducing barriers to entry into this potentially lucrative market.

Keeping People Healthy

In today’s complex environment, individuals cannot be trusted to care for themselves or their children, and rightfully so. The survival and prosperity of our society is predicated on passive consumption of massive quantities of goods and services. Our electronic way of life is designed based on the timeless axiom of “don’t make me think”, and an extra click of a button is considered undue burden on average consumers. We are expected to ingest billions of Big Macs to keep the economy chugging, and go through trillions of disposable trinkets sold on the Internet to keep WWIII from erupting. Even getting the news every morning has been replaced with news “feeds” to save you the long walk down the driveway to pick up the old newspaper. And turning pages, even on the Internet, is too much of an imposition. What makes us excellent consumers is also rendering us unfit to be trusted with our own health.

In this age of patient empowerment and freedom from paternalistic physicians, it seems that primary care doctors are being put in charge of keeping us healthy. It only seems that way though, because nobody needs a doctor’s education and expertise, not to mention expense, to figure out what every good grandma, and every single one of us, knows already. Besides, going to see a doctor does not fit with our tried and true, instantly gratifying, passive consumption paradigm. In our new way of so called life, primary care becomes an electronic assistant that uses, and is used by, every consumer, every day. Note that the modern term “primary care provider” is specifically geared to this low level function. Nobody uses the term cardiology provider, or surgery provider, or even pediatrics provider, to refer to a medical doctor. Primary care is different.

• Primary care monitors your food intake and level of exercise, reminding you to eat your veggies (or no dessert) and take your constitutional regularly
• Primary care reminds you, or schedules for you, health screenings and preventive care services as recommended by your government
• Primary care monitors your vital signs and lets you know if normal parameters are exceeded
• Primary care answers your questions if you feel under the weather, or just concerned that you might be
• Primary care treats minor illness and injuries, such as mosquito bites and nail fungus
• Primary care is available 24x7 from the comfort of your iPhone, or in extreme cases next to the bakery counter at your favorite discount store
• Primary care is provided by Siri and augmented by certified technicians with impeccable customer service credentials

If you have a sudden urge to kick me in the shins right now, remember that primary care is not your profession. You are credentialed in Family Medicine, Internal Medicine or Pediatric Medicine, keyword here being Medicine. Yes, you may be providing some of these services for some of your patients, mostly for free, but is this really what you want to do all day, every day? Yes, having people come see you when they are healthy, better equips you to care for them when they are sick, but this seems a luxury few can afford today. The new primary care has as much to do with practicing medicine, as fixing traffic tickets has to do with practicing law. It is a piece of your old practice that has been successfully carved out by competing businesses that can and will be providing these, and many more, services to your patients. And if you’re not careful, specialists will take whatever is left on your plate.

Healing the Sick

When primary care was defined by Barbara Starfield as high quality, compassionate, comprehensive general medicine, it was an honor to be called a primary care physician. Today, the term is becoming essentially oxymoronic. Physicians, contemplating the plucking of low hanging fruit from their scope of practice, are usually concerned with being forced to juggle a schedule full of complex patients, with no cognitive respite throughout the day. This, however, is highly unlikely. If you subtract the healthy and easy patients from your schedule, they are not going to be magically replaced by an equal number of very sick individuals. Instead of 25 to 30 spurts of quick encounters, you are more likely to experience 12 to 15 long visits per day. Is that so bad?

It is very bad if your pay rate stays the same. It is spectacularly good if it doubles and triples. Whereas primary care physicians of the past are trapped in high-volume hamster wheel races, the new family docs, internists and pediatricians will be providing real value to their patients. Since the pundits are screaming from every rooftop that we should be transitioning from volume to value, this seems like a perfect arrangement for all stakeholders. Value, of course, needs to be valued, so paying, say, $300 for a doctor visit (not to be confused with primary care) sounds pretty respectable to me.

Corner drugstores are full of medicines and gadgets that used to be exclusively available from doctors. There is nothing new in transitioning tests and therapies into the hands of the lay public. You don’t have a microscope and a rabbit in your office, do you? Quit worrying about nurses and retail stores and the Internet stealing your lunch. You didn’t go to medical school to coach poor people on their sinful lifestyles and their need to be righteous and deserving of charity. You wanted to heal the sick, so have at it. If you want to fight for something, don’t fight for volume. Fight for value. Your value.

Artificial Intelligence

Did you know that the Ford Motor Company which created the first mass produced horseless carriage in 1908 is one of the largest manufacturers of automobiles a century later? Did you notice how cars today look almost the same as the Model T? They are all made of metal, have four wheels, a steering wheel, a dashboard, a windshield, two rows of seats and an engine. Closer inspection reveals that all newer car manufacturers make cars that look and feel just like the cars made by the Ford Motor Company. And they all drive on roads and use wheels, wheels, the hottest disruptive innovation of the Neolithic era. Truly disruptive innovation, unlike its short lived destructive cousins, stretches across millennia of useful applications.

Strangely enough, beds and tables and chairs, and the houses they furnish, look basically the same as those used by Louis XIV. Bread loaves and wine look the same too, and so do fishes. Another thing that hasn’t changed much from the beginning of time is the fertility of our collective imagination. At one time we imagined cherubs floating on clouds and magical beings who control the world and every single life within it. Entire industries sprung around that innovation, industries whose thought-leaders ruled the world in the name and on behalf of our imaginary hopes and mostly fears. For a while there, we decided that imagination is a personal thing and it should be separated from the mundane tangibles of our earthly affairs. That didn’t last long.

What separates us from the hapless creatures we are now killing by the bushel is the capacity and need to believe in something greater than ourselves, something that transcends our mortality and provides us with a purpose external to our own existence. First it was the certain belief in an omnipotent, and incomprehensible to mere mortals, intelligent design of the world we live in. Now it is the arrogant belief in our ability to create our future creator, an artificial intelligence to supersede our own, and to shape the world in ways beyond the wildest dreams of avarice and the trembling terrors of perdition’s flames. The age old puzzle of whether God can make a rock so big and heavy that even He cannot lift it, seems about to be resolved.

Suffering today, being beaten, tortured, starved and killed, is just fine, because after that comes your own personal Garden of Eden. Being unemployed, unemployable and living on meager handouts with no hope for a better future for you or your children, is perfectly fine, because after that comes “the eradication of disease and poverty”. Well, it is not “unfathomable” that it comes, and that’s pretty good, so go ahead and fathom amongst yourselves. And be afraid, very afraid, because unless you give us more money to study how we should go about doing the right thing, some really scary scenarios, such as having Gov. Schwarzenegger chase you in the middle of the night, are also fathomable. When? Sooner than you think, if you are still thinking, otherwise let’s say next Tuesday.

Stating that we are on the verge of creating artificial intelligence superior to the human brain, when we can't even make artificial chickens at this point, sounds a bit specious, doesn’t it? But that is not preventing us from incessantly talking and writing about it in order to generate the tried and true mixture of hopes for salvation, at an unspecified time in the future, with immediate and actionable fears of doing wrong today. We have magnificent prophets and we already have the heretics lined up as well. Did you ever wonder why some prophets had their litanies included in definitive compilations of bibles, while others were literally and figuratively burned at the stake? It may be helpful to look behind the curtains at those who anointed the prophets then and those who are anointing them now, because they are one and the same.

The job of prophets has always been to strip commoners of their ability to make independent decisions. Today’s prophets of disruptive innovation are showing us the road to becoming Roman patricians spending our entire lives sprawled on fainting couches while being fanned and fed gorgeous grapes by beautiful machines. The first thing we must do is to offload decision making to the precursor of the slave-savant machine of the future, so it can learn and practice the art and science of pleasuring us. Letting your GPS decide how to get from point A to point B is one example, and letting Google decide what you should read is another, although the latter may soon become obsolete, since enjoying grapes on your couch does not require any reading. Letting your “phone” decide when you should stand and when you should sit, when to eat and what to eat, and when you feel and how you feel is the next step in our evolution towards a perfect union between amino acids and silicon compounds.  

Perhaps nothing illustrates our glorious path to heaven on earth better than health care, and befittingly so, since health is life, hence health care is life care, is everything. The old definition of health care included mostly restorative medical activities to one’s health, but as the value of people keeps declining in an overpopulated global economy, and the costs of repairs are increasing, a more expansive, machine oriented, definition seems in order. People, you see, are essentially carbon-based machines, like say cars, the only analogy simpleminded voters seem to comprehend. To reduce your lifetime expenses on your car, and to enjoy a reliable vehicle for the duration, you need to have all the maintenance done on schedule (e.g. oil changes, tire rotation, filters, belts, etc.), drive carefully and obey the law, use the car sparingly, without too much starting and stopping, and you should wash and wax regularly, and generally keep it nice and clean inside and out.

You get the recommended preventive care for your model, all the screenings and tests, so any early signs of malfunction can be addressed, and you swallow all the recommended additives to make operations smooth and well lubricated, without undue stress to any of your parts, especially the feeble brain part. You refrain from reckless activities, and keep your mind and body clean on the inside and on the outside. The prophets, or futurists, as they prefer to be addressed today, are guiding us to all sorts of little silicon parts that we can incorporate in ourselves on the incremental road to transferring the limited intelligence functionality of biological creatures to superior artificial components. This simple process of artificial evolution towards a brighter future does not seem to come naturally to most people. These things never do. This is precisely why piety and obedience need to be enforced by cannons and laws, and here and there a few weaklings or outright skeptics must be made examples of what people should fear most.

Google is now making self-driving cars and in the future it will be making self-driving people. Whereas the self-driving Google cars look the same as those made by the Ford Motors Company, the futuristic self-driving Google people will look indistinguishable from the Neolithic geniuses who invented the wheel. And just like the Google cars are not really driving themselves, the Google people won’t either. Google is driving the cars and Google will be driving the people, and Google is driven by people. As it always has been and as it always shall be, a handful of megalomaniacal people will be driving masses of other people into hopeless existence, although, this time around, hopelessness should come with grape-dispensing machines and free happy pills.

Artificial intelligence is not autonomous machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence is not the fictional story of cyborgs roaming the earth. It is the story of the Wizard of Oz, the story of Stalin and Maoist reeducation, the story of Torquemada and the Dark Ages, the story of Egyptian Pharaohs and high priests clad in jewels accepting offerings from starving barefooted men while overseeing ritual sacrifices. It is the story of a cosmically inconsequential power trip that may set us back millennia instead of just centuries. At times like this, we should keep in mind that the true innovations driving humanity, and all cyclical prophecies of bliss and gloom along the way, were invented by men who were just slightly removed from apes.

Why Physicians Must Unionize

If F. A. Hayek were alive today, he would support the revival of labor unions in general and professional labor unions in particular. Towards the end of the Second World War, Hayek wrote a book warning us all that allowing governments to engage in extensive central planning of economic activities is nothing more than a road to serfdom for humanity. F.A. Hayek was not an Ayn Rand sociopath, and he included in his vision reasonable government regulation of markets, strong safety nets, and something that looks awfully similar to the avant-garde “guaranteed basic income” discussed nowadays in some European countries. Unfortunately for us, and kudos to Prof. Hayek, seventy years after the publication of his book, we are well on our way to universal indentured servitude.

Ordinary Citizens

In September 2014, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, two Princeton researchers, published the results of a longitudinal study on policy decisions in the U.S. from 1981 to 2002. After crunching enormous amounts of data, Gilens and Page conclude that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”. In spite of enjoying all the trappings of democracy (e.g. freedom of speech, widespread franchise), we seem to live in a “democracy by coincidence, in which ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots”.

Perhaps that’s how it always was, and certainly that’s how it is now, but at several points in our history government enacted policies in stark contrast to the interests of both economic elites and business interests. Labor laws were just such an occurrence. Labor unions in their various formats could be viewed as the tool by which the interests of average citizens, the “revolt from below”, were channeled into mass-based interest groups that were powerful enough to counteract the interests of economic elites and their business groups, at least for a while. When big business managed to weaken the early unions during the 1920s, we got ourselves a Great Depression. In the midst of our self-inflicted misery, unions came back roaring to take on big businesses and the government they thoroughly controlled. Most workplace protections and gains in workers’ wages date to that era. Eventually though, big business prevailed. The Taft-Harley Act (or the “slave-labor bill”, as Harry Truman referred to it) was enacted in 1947, and it all went downhill from there to this day.

Physicians

Physicians in the U.S. belong to the economic elites, as defined by Gilens and Page. Theoretically speaking, the profession should have been able to influence government policies to its advantage, and arguably that was the case for most of the twentieth century. In the 21st century, we are witnessing the industrialization of medicine, and although physicians are still handsomely compensated for their labor, a marked deterioration in their working conditions is gradually occurring. Whereas the industrial revolutions decimated the numbers of master craftsmen who owned their own tools (means of production) and increased the number of journeymen (workers for hire), the industrialization of medicine is decimating the ranks of physicians who own medical facilities, while swelling the ranks of employed doctors.

The master craftsmen of two hundred years ago were driven out of business, and down into wage labor, because they could not compete with industrialized manufacturing. Independent physicians today are driven into employment solely by government policies, since industrial medicine is neither cheaper, nor better than the cottage industry it replaces. Medicine is not really undergoing a revolution as much as a hostile takeover by big business, with full government support. Once a critical mass of employed physicians is reached, and independent practice is no longer viewed as a viable option, chances are that the wages of physicians will more closely align with the wages of every other labor sector. This is therefore the very last opportunity for doctors to leverage their economic elite status and find a way to pair it with an equally powerful interest group, i.e. a Union.

When unions were strong, America prospered. When unions were crushed, neutered or fell victim to their own internal corruption, American economy barely sputtered along. Big business propaganda notwithstanding, unions are not about socialism, communism or collectivism. The sole purpose of unions in a capitalist economy is to counterbalance the excessive influence of economic elites and business interest groups, allowing ordinary citizens to get what they want from time to time. Unions are there to preserve democracy and keep us off that cursed road to serfdom. Even if you are a hardcore free-market conservative, sincerely believing that organized labor is evil, you must understand that often times it takes a lesser evil to combat the greater evil. Discussing, analyzing, lamenting, advocating or pontificating, is no longer sufficient.

A Physicians Union

A physicians union would be very different than the labor unions of the twentieth century. A physicians union would be a true innovation. To be effective, a physicians union would need to include in its folds both employed and independent doctors. Thus, a physicians union cannot be a traditional labor union. Both employed physicians’ salaries and independent doctors’ revenues are driven by the same factors, and although regulatory actions burden independents to larger extents, all are adversely affected by government policies. As long as there is no excess supply of physicians, the alignment of interests between independents and salaried docs, far exceeds any real or perceived conflicts.

The same cannot be said about medical specialties, but a truly powerful physicians union will need to include all specialists as well. If the original Medicare fee setting process drove an enormous wedge between primary care and specialists, the new value-based payment schemes are well positioned to amplify and exacerbate conflicts across all specialties. It is therefore imperative for a physicians union to resolve these conflicts and find a way to work together, or in other words, get over it, because the exact order in which you go down is less important than the fact that eventually everybody will be taken down.

And then there’s politics, but I have faith that intelligent and educated people understand by now that the sole difference between progressive and conservative agendas, is a personal preference to have your serfdom managed either through a government intermediary, or directly by the business overlords. There are also legal issues to ferret out and negotiate. But by far the toughest barrier to creating such union consists of the physicians themselves. Unlike the miners or the railroad workers who build the labor unions in this country, physicians don’t live in squalor, and they don’t put their lives on the line every day for a pittance. As a group, physicians are largely conservative and not given to activism. And this is precisely why an American physicians union can become the most formidable social innovation of our times.

Together We Stand

Did you know that on January 12th, 2,600 mental health workers and 700 other workers at Kaiser Permanente in California will be launching a strike to protest the inadequacy of mental health care at Kaiser? They won’t accomplish much, if anything. There is no coverage in the media, no buzz, no controversy, no lengthy exposés, no debate and no threats from the White House. What do you think would be the reaction if 17,000 physicians employed by Kaiser would walk out at the same time? And what would happen if several hundred thousand members of the Physicians Union of America would walk out as well? I bet mental health services at Kaiser, and everywhere else, would be the talk of the nation, and somehow the funds to hire and pay decent wages to mental health professionals would miraculously materialize.

Imagine a professional union fighting for the freedom of its individual members to exercise professional judgment for the sole benefit of individual citizens. Imagine a medical union fighting to provide the best care to ordinary citizens, free from the whims of the political and business classes. Now close your eyes and imagine the shock and awe created by a union of the best, the brightest, the most successful, most educated, most trusted, most ethical and most irreplaceable group of citizens, standing up and unequivocally stating that central planning has gone too far and has reached levels of immorality that are beyond what a free society can peacefully tolerate.  Then imagine that such union has the power to shut down every hospital, every medical facility and every practice, in every city, every town and every hamlet across the land, bringing the medical industrial complex to a grinding halt.  And now, open your eyes and make a wish...

What’s to Become of Primary Care? Or, Something to Do with Computers

You may not be ready to admit it even to yourself, but you know it’s changing. Permanently. Some say it’s for the better. Others say it’s for the worse. Most don’t really care much one way or the other. After all, health care has been evolving and changing over thousands of years, and the experts best positioned to evaluate the health care turmoil of our times are yet to be born. Those of us who are now in the eye of the storm have an understandable tendency to analyze high velocity changes, such as the number of uninsured or the number of hospital mergers, but the slower and more permanent changes are unfolding deep below the surface. Perhaps the most enduring alteration to what we call health care is the diminishment of medicine as a whole, and the fading importance of its practitioners, starting with the outer edges of primary care.

The “Looming” Primary Care Physician Shortage

We’ve been experiencing a “looming” primary care doctor shortage for several decades now, and so far it somehow failed to progress beyond the looming stage. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is adding millions of previously uninsured citizens to the already swollen ranks of health care consumers, which is bound to exacerbate the shortage of primary care physicians, particularly as we move from sick care to health care, which is mostly to be provided by primary care facilities. As the public is wringing its hands in fear and apprehension, several solutions to this life-threatening shortage are being proposed and proactively implemented. The first and foremost solution is to allow non-physicians to provide primary care, whether in care teams with a physician figurehead in the corner office, or in retail settings at the grocery store. The second and longer term solution is the institution of remote medical care, provided by a mixture of outsourced physicians, non-physicians and algorithmic self-service apps.

The primary care shortage narrative is now as well established as death and taxes. Our constant inability to address this shortage is also immutable, and it has been so for all the decades we could have used to train more primary care doctors. Whether by design or by happenstance, we are now working hard to reduce demand, and perceived need, for actual doctors in primary care, and at the same time, we are working equally hard, if not harder, to increase the soothing volume of cheap and inconsequential services which are considered part of primary care. Ironically, it took many decades of random and often times planned decisions, made largely by the medical establishment to create this apparent discrepancy, and the pattern continues to this day.

Primary Care is Like Jiffy Lube

How often do you hear conservative doctors, still fighting the good old fight of 1965, stating that if your car insurance were to pay for oil changes, it would also cost a fortune? Insurance, you see, should be reserved for catastrophic events, and everything else should be paid with cash by each individual. And if the individual has no cash, then how many grocery stores would give you food (which is also lifesaving) if you had no money to pay for it? These positions are practically impossible to debate, particularly since personal charity is always the answer to opposing arguments. Oil changes and basic food are indeed planned and fully expected expenditures that each responsible person should budget for, and so are routine and non-catastrophic medical needs. But guess what else all these things appear to have in common? They are simple, undifferentiated, commoditized goods and services that anyone can provide, and many people can provide for themselves.

If primary care is to medicine what Jiffy Lube is to the automotive industry, we don’t need physicians to deliver primary care. Period. Even more astonishing is that this seems to be the main argument put forward by the direct primary care (DPC) movement. Previously known as concierge medicine, i.e. extra quality for more money, DPC makes the straightforward argument that good primary care is a cheap commodity made expensive by inordinate layers of insurance and bureaucratic regulation. For $60 a month or so, you can have all the primary care you can eat, if you pay directly to whoever employs your doctor, or if your purchasers (i.e. insurer or employer) do the same thing on your behalf, which renders direct primary care anything but direct, but that’s another story altogether. Strangely enough, I don’t see too many dermatologists stepping all over each other to convince us that what they do is worth very little money.

Divide and Conquer

Prof. George Weisz wrote a book titled “Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specialization”. I am not sure who was conquering what, but the slow current that will eventually wipe physicians out, as a profession, has its origins in the formally organized specialization of medicine.  Among the many theories and scientific justifications for the inevitability of specialization, Dr. Carl August Wunderlich observed as early as 1841 that “Now a specialty is a necessary condition for everybody who wants to become rich and famous rapidly”. The quest for fame and fortune, which has been our engine of advancement, has the localized consequence of turning each step forward into a giant zero sum game. For some physicians to become rich and famous, many others had to accept less wealth and lower status in society. And after kicking and screaming for a while, they all did.

In the beginning, a specialized physician was one who voluntarily chose to “restrict” or “limit” his practice to certain portions of general practice. In due course, general practice became involuntarily restricted to whatever specialists chose not to do. The scientific and largely elitist arguments of the nineteen century were used iteratively over time in increasingly contrived contexts, culminating with the late twentieth century expulsion of general practitioners from hospital care.  Hospitals today, although very different than hospitals in the nineteen century, are still the mechanism by which wealth and fame are accumulated in medicine. Agreeing to stay out of the cathedrals of medicine, pretty much sealed the fate of primary care.

Public Health

What is then left for primary care to do? I am certain this question is offensive to physicians practicing primary care. After all, it’s not just medicine that changed over the last couple of centuries. Disease itself was changed as a result. Today we have scores of people living with multiple chronic conditions, each one fatal on its own merit until not too long ago, and the generalist doctor is best positioned to manage the whole sick person. Some primary care physicians are still treading in specialist and hospitalist territories without apology and doing a great job at that too. However, the insidious slow current underneath it all, is not only continuing its menacing advance, but it is accelerating, because when physicians as a profession ceded control to specialists, they also invited into the tent other more powerful interests seeking their own riches and fame.

In the olden days physicians chose to specialize after they invented something, or became enthralled with new technologies or a certain group of diseases. Specialization allowed physicians to gain expertise using complex instruments and provided access to larger populations of people afflicted with whatever they were trying to study and improve. Scientific discovery in medicine followed the same pattern as in all other fields where groundbreaking research required an obsessively narrow focus. Excelling at one particular thing, as opposed to being adequate at everything, brought financial and personal rewards. This paradigm is being broken now by a brand new instrument – the computer, and by a brand new group of diseases – being alive. 

Just like the invention of the ophthalmoscope created the formal specialty of ophthalmology, the application of computers to medicine is creating the spanking new specialty of informatics, with one huge difference. Whereas the old specialization by organ, disease or instrument, was designed to narrow practice focus to subsets of patients, and small parts of each patient, informatics aims to expand its scope of practice to include every living person. Informatics is essentially the use of computers to practice an expansive and aggressive version of public health, which includes preventive, curative and research medicine. And thus, general practice on a much grander scale is resurrected, because old King Solomon was right and “that which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done”.

Something to do with Computers

That slow subterranean current that is changing medicine is the same one that changed and will continue to change everything we do into an industry. Nourishment became the food industry. Moving from place to place morphed into the travel industry, including automotive and aviation in its folds. Swapping is now the retail industry, and guarding one’s offspring and possessions became the defense industry. Some of these changes took thousands of years to complete, while others were executed seemingly overnight. Medicine is now engaged in its much delayed transformation to a healthcare (one word) industry.

The main difference between industries and the decentralized processes they replaced is that industries have captains, gurus, thought leaders and regulators, who rarely if ever interact with the masses serviced by the industry, i.e. consumers. The direct providers of industrial services are mostly laypeople, themselves consumers, rewarded with tokens they can use to cross-consume other industrial services. Fame and riches are reserved for the small but potent and irreplaceable captain class – the planners, the organizers and the administrators of industrial efficiency and productivity.

The stethoscope improved on a doctor’s ear, so he can more closely listen to a patient’s heart or lungs. The ophthalmoscope improved the vision of a specialist physician, so he can better see inside the eyes of each patient. The computer is improving the brains of all physicians, so they can treat entire populations without having to see, hear or touch any patients. Physicians specializing (or generalizing) in informatics are the captains of the emerging healthcare industry. The primacy of the general practitioner of old is finally being restored to the supremacy of the physician informaticist of new.

If the illustrious Dr. Wunderlich were to take the temperature of medicine today, he would indubitably observe that modern physicians, who want to become rich and famous rapidly, should find something to do with computers.