Imagine fewer doctors and more machines assessing your health.
That’s what venture capitalist Vinod Khosla sees in the coming decades, as machines become more accurate at diagnosing health issues, and doctors remain just as fallible.
A survey of 40 cardiologists proves his point, Khosla recently told the MIT Technology Review Digital Summit in San Francisco. The doctors were given a set of data and asked whether the patient should have cardiac surgery. Half said yes and half said no. Two years later, the same cardiologists were surveyed again, and handed the same data. Forty percent of them changed their minds, Khosla said.
Khosla says much of the diagnostic work that doctors now perform can be done by machines, though doctors still are needed to make ethical calls. But a great deal of diagnostic work can not only be done by machines, but machines that patients control, perhaps with their cell phones.
A bevy of new applications can offer first-aid treatment advice, take images of an ear, help you administer an EKG or take an image of a troublesome-looking mole, Khosla says.
Khosla got his start as one of the founders of Sun Microsystems Inc., which was later bought by Oracle Corp. Later, he became a partner at legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He now heads his own VC firm, Khosla Ventures, which specializes in digital health ventures.
Date: July 28, 2014