Self-Driving Health

Lots of news about this recently.  Five years ago, you would shake your head and say “no way – not in my lifetime.”  Now you know that this is our future.  It will be safer, will save billions of dollars, and will be have positive consequences we can barely imagine.  The kids need to go to soccer practice?  Send them.  Get the dog to the vet for his check-up?  Plop him in the car and off he goes. It’s real. It will happen.  Soon. So why is it so hard for us to imagine self-driving health?  Do we have a crisis of under-supply of primary care?  Yes.  Today we do .  But I wonder if that’s because we’re asking the wrong question.  Earlier this week, I heard that we would need 60,000 additional primary care visits in our community to reduce the demand for non-urgent visits in our emergency departments.  If a primary care provider can see 25 patients a day – then we need ten additional providers in our community (250/day = 1250/week = 5000/month = 60,000/year).   But what if those 25 visits that didn’t need an ED visit ALSO didn’t require a primary care visit?  What if “visits” in 8 x 10 exam rooms with white-coated professionals weren’t the solution?  Let’s play the “five why” exercise: Donald Duck went to the Emergency Department Why did he go to the emergency department?   Because he didn’t feel well and wanted to feel better. Why didn’t he feel well?  Becau...
Source: Docnotes - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs