You’ve just spent four years in medical school, finished two years of residency, racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, but finally, you’re a doctor! And now a robot is going to take your job away.
Not quite. But robots have become ubiquitous in hospitals and healthcare facilities across the country, doing everything from prostatectomies, to hysterectomies, to helping those paralyzed by strokes, to even delivering trays and laundry.
But no doubt about it, there’s been some worry. Writing for Slate earlier this year, Farhad Manjoo raised an interesting question with his headline, “"Will robots steal your job?" According to another story, at healthcareitnews.com, written by Mike Miliard, some physicians think so.
Miliard writes that machines can be better at noticing abnormalities on radiology reports than the human eye and in Japan, they’re even caring for the elderly – though it remains to be seen just how popular they are!
But the emergence of Watson, IBM’s humanlike computer –and his (her?) ability to process the equivalent of a million books per second would be put to use in healthcare, according to Miliard – seems to be making everyone think a little more about the possibility of robots taking over the world.
"Watson isn't intended to replace anyone," Josko Silobrcic, MD, associate partner at IBM Research, told Miliard in an interview. "But it is a tool. A much more advanced form of decision support in healthcare that we didn't have available to us until this point."
In fact, Watson is working with Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSKCC) to develop a powerful tool to help improve the ability of healthcare providers to “personalize” treatments to cancer patients’ specific needs. Watson can process 200 million pages of information in less than 3 seconds, according to IBM, and once it’s loaded with oncology information, it will be able to begin targeting therapies for individual patients at MSKCC.
"The volume of healthcare information is increasing tremendously and probably accelerating," Silobrcic told Miliard. "Some of the more recent scientific discoveries have contributed to that tremendously. That exceeds the training of healthcare providers, as well as their ability to keep up with it. We all know how busy clinicians are." He added that Watson just wants to help.
Of course, robots will never have the bedside manner of physicians and nurses. And he does make mistakes. Not too many doctors would think Toronto is a U.S. city, as Watson once did.
But they’re actually even going home with patients, now, too. Four-foot-6, and weighing as much as a small child, the two wheel robots at Children’s Hospital in Boston are mainly used as a videoconferencing tool, but they give families of hospital patients a way to keep in touch with doctors and nurses from home in between post-surgical appointments. Now that’s not something most doctors would do!
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
