Recently, I was asked by the European Journal of Clinical & Medical Oncology to write a guest blog post about automating the diagnosis process. This request came in light of a discussion I started on a Linkedin group called Innovation in Health, about this very same topic.

Click here to read the guest blog post.

If you follow recent news about the role social media is playing in health care, you can’t miss a few studies that show an increase in the number of patients seeking medical information online. I was visiting a friend recently who had just recovered from the flu, and yet was still feeling pain in her paranasal sinuses. Being the health technology enthusiast I am, I asked her if she had heard of WebMD’s Symptoms Checker. I installed the WebMD app on her iPad and went on to demonstrate the interactive Symptoms Checker where you have a 3D model of the body, and get a list of potential symptoms if you click on any part of the body. The symptom checker is detailed in the sense that it asks follow-up questions to describe the symptom as accurately as possible using unified nomenclatures. As more symptoms are entered, the potential conditions list is narrowed down. You can then click on any of the potential conditions to read more about it.

Since the computer has the potential to replace the physician in this scenario, where do we draw the line? Is the benefit of the technology solely in standardized and simplified data entry? or can patients in the near future expect improved auto-diagnostic tools that save them the trip of going to a physician. I personally have no doubt that while we are not there yet, advances in Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence (AI), biosensors, and the ever increasing use of social media will provide us with the following: Read the rest of this entry