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Medicine Revolutionized: The Patient Will See You Now
What if you could diagnose a skin condition more accurately than a dermatologist using just your smartphone? What if your watch could detect an irregular heartbeat before you felt any symptoms? What if you could access your complete medical records anytime, anywhere? This isn't science fiction-it's the new reality of medicine that Dr. Eric Topol explores in his groundbreaking work. Dubbed "healthcare's most important book of the decade" by Forbes, "The Patient Will See You Now" has captured attention across industries from Silicon Valley to hospital boardrooms. Even Oprah featured Topol demonstrating these revolutionary technologies on her show. The book's thesis-that smartphones will democratize medicine the way Gutenberg's printing press democratized knowledge-represents perhaps the most significant power shift in the history of healthcare, challenging a 2,500-year tradition of medical paternalism.
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The Great Medical Power Shift
For millennia, doctors have controlled all medical information. The traditional model placed physicians in positions of absolute authority-they owned the data, made the decisions, and expected patients to follow orders without question. Remember Elaine from Seinfeld being labeled a "difficult patient" for simply looking at her chart? That wasn't just comedy; it reflected reality.
This power imbalance wasn't accidental. Hippocrates himself instructed physicians to "conceal most things from the patient" and even lie when necessary, believing patients incapable of understanding medicine's mysteries. This paternalism strengthened over centuries, with the American Medical Association's original 1847 Code of Ethics describing medicine as a "noble task" requiring physicians with "greatness of mission" to exercise "condescension with authority" over patients who owed "prompt and implicit" obedience.
Today, this paradigm is crumbling. Smartphones enable instant medical assessments through apps that can diagnose conditions, monitor vital signs, and even perform sophisticated tests once requiring expensive equipment. Patients can access physician ratings, compare costs, and review their own medical records. The information asymmetry that defined medicine for thousands of years is dissolving as technology puts healthcare literally in patients' hands.
Consider these examples of patient empowerment: Jeanette Erdmann, after 45 years of declining health, diagnosed her rare Ulrich muscular dystrophy via Google search and confirmed it through genomic sequencing. Twelve-year-old Elena Simon, after surviving a rare liver cancer, sequenced her tumor for a school project, discovering the mutation causing her disease. Grace Wilsey's father used social media to connect with other families, identifying the NGLY1 gene mutation causing his daughter's condition.
These cases share a common thread-connectivity-that enables patients to diagnose conditions, connect with others, and drive medical discoveries outside traditional healthcare channels. Our hyperconnected world fuels medicine's democratization, with platforms like PatientsLikeMe enabling patients to learn from each other without time or location constraints.
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From Gutenberg to Google: A Historical Parallel
To understand today's medical revolution, we must look to history's greatest information revolution: Gutenberg's printing press. In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg combined metal type, oil-based ink, and a modified wine press to create what historian Elizabeth Eisenstein called "the most radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life in the history of western civilization."
The economic impact was staggering-reducing book costs from approximately $20,000 to $70 (300 times less). Production speed increased dramatically: three men could print 300 books in three months versus taking lifetimes to hand-scribe the same number. Within 50 years, more books existed than in all previous human history, with an estimated 1,000 printing presses producing millions of books across Europe by 1500.
This revolution transformed society from "the age of the ear" to "the age of the eye," dramatically increasing literacy beyond the privileged 8% who could previously read. Social networking flourished through reading rooms, coffeehouses, and bookshops where people gathered to discuss new ideas. The printing press birthed modern science by enabling experiments to be published, reviewed, and confirmed.
Today's smartphone revolution parallels this transformation but at unprecedented scale and speed. What took books 400 years to achieve in Europe, smartphones accomplished in just 8 years, with a thousand times more units for a population only twenty times larger. Like Gutenberg's press which spread globally through religious evangelism, smartphones have flattened the Earth with over seven billion cellphones exceeding the number of toilets or toothbrushes globally.
Just as Martin Luther's 95 Theses challenged church authority with 300,000 widely distributed copies, smartphones now challenge medical paternalism by revolutionizing information flow. Instead of data trickling down from doctors to patients, smartphones channel information directly to individuals-from personal health records to biosensor data, lab tests, scans, genomics, and environmental factors.
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The Angelina Effect: Taking Control of Your Genetic Destiny
When Angelina Jolie published her New York Times op-ed "My Medical Choice" in May 2013, she created what's been called "the Angelina Effect"-a global impact that transcends celebrity medical news to represent a fundamental shift toward patient autonomy in healthcare decisions.
After discovering she carried a BRCA1 mutation giving her an 87% risk of breast cancer and 50% risk of ovarian cancer, Jolie chose the most aggressive preventive strategy-bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction. Her warrior-like approach and public disclosure just two weeks after surgery dramatically increased awareness about the link between genetics and cancer. A national survey found 74% of Americans were aware of Jolie's prophylactic mastectomy, with half knowing her estimated cancer risk.
The "Angelina Effect" triggered a global surge in BRCA testing-Myriad Genetics reported a 52% revenue increase, and some UK clinics saw fourfold increases in prophylactic mastectomies. Beyond raising awareness, Jolie's disclosure represents a tipping point in medicine-symbolizing individual empowerment through access to personal genomic information.
This story intersects with broader issues in consumer genomics. When 23andMe faced FDA scrutiny for marketing their "Portraits of Health" campaign, it sparked heated debate about regulatory overreach. Critics noted inconsistencies in FDA oversight-traditional risk calculators remain unregulated while consumer genomics face stringent controls, laboratory-developed genetic tests operate without FDA approval, and the supplement industry ($32 billion annually) faces minimal oversight.
The BRCA genes central to Jolie's surgery became the test case for gene patenting in America. After Myriad Genetics was granted patents for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene sequences in 1996, they aggressively enforced their monopoly, charging $3,000-$4,000 per test. The Supreme Court's 2013 ruling that isolated genomic DNA cannot be patented fundamentally democratized genomic information by freeing our DNA from future patent constraints.
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Your Complete Medical Identity: The Human GIS
Imagine having a comprehensive, multi-layered "Google map of you"-a rich, multi-scale mosaic of your digitized medical identity. This human Geographic Information System (GIS) integrates diverse data streams to define your complete medical essence and enable truly individualized healthcare.
The human GIS comprises multiple integrated "omes" that collectively provide what I call a "panoromic" view of each person:
• The phenome (observable traits plus social graph)
• The physiome (physiologic metrics from biosensors)
• The anatome (individual anatomy from imaging)
• The genome (DNA sequence)
• The transcriptome (RNA expression)
• The proteome (proteins)
• The metabolome (metabolites)
• The microbiome (coinhabiting microbes)
• The epigenome (DNA packaging and side chains)
• The exposome (environmental exposures)
While no one has yet had the complete "full Monty," Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder has come closest, with his genome sequenced and multiple assessments of his transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome. This approach helped him diagnose diabetes mellitus following a respiratory infection-a connection previously unreported.
This comprehensive approach enables truly personalized medicine across the lifespan:
• Before conception: Genetic screening can identify carrier status for serious conditions like cystic fibrosis (1 in 40), spinal muscular atrophy (1 in 35), or Tay-Sachs (1 in 27 among Ashkenazi Jews).
• During pregnancy: Non-invasive prenatal testing through maternal blood samples can diagnose major chromosomal abnormalities without invasive procedures.
• For newborns: Whole genome sequencing can be completed in under 24 hours, providing immediate actionable information while serving as a lifelong resource.
• For undiagnosed diseases: Genome sequencing now offers hope after exhaustive medical workups, with diagnosis rates of 25-50%.
• For cancer: Comprehensive tumor profiling enables matching specific drugs to driver mutations, while "liquid biopsies" allow tumor DNA to be isolated and sequenced from blood samples.
• For medication response: Pharmacogenomics reveals how an individual's genome modulates medication effectiveness, with some DNA-drug interactions showing 38-120 fold differences in therapeutic response.
The human GIS represents a massive, multi-scale information system for each individual. Crucially, this GIS must be owned by the individual (or parents, in the case of children), as it's their medical essence, their data, what makes them tick. No one has a more vested interest in its proper use.
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The Revolution in Medical Testing and Imaging
Lab testing represents a critical but outdated component of healthcare, with roughly ten billion tests performed annually in the US, influencing 70-80% of medical decisions. Elizabeth Holmes, who founded Theranos at nineteen, aimed to revolutionize this field by making tests more efficient, accessible, less painful, and significantly cheaper. Their innovation replaces traditional phlebotomy with a simple finger prick that collects a droplet of blood in a "nanotainer," running over fifty different tests with results available in minutes rather than hours.
The next revolution is the "lab on a chip" (LOC)-miniaturized testing devices that attach to smartphones. These microfluidic devices use the phone's microprocessor and display to analyze tiny samples of blood, urine, saliva, breath, or DNA. The range of smartphone-enabled tests is remarkably diverse: blood tests for glucose, hemoglobin, cholesterol, liver function, and various pathogens; urine tests for pregnancy complications and infections; saliva tests for influenza and strep throat; and even breath analysis for lactate, alcohol, drugs, and certain cancers.
Beyond smartphone attachments, we're moving toward implantable sensors-lab-in-the-body (LIB) technology. Researchers are developing bloodstream-embedded biosensors that detect genomic signals to predict heart attacks or identify early-stage cancers. Other innovations include implantable sensors that continuously track drug levels, magnetic resonance reflexometry using antibody-coated particles to measure cardiac proteins, and optical nanosensors monitoring glucose and electrolytes.
Medical imaging has also been transformed through miniaturization. Three of the five major imaging modalities have been successfully miniaturized to handheld size:
• Portable X-rays via smartphone-sized devices now utilize triboluminescence, eliminating the need for fragile glass tubes and high voltage.
• MRI miniaturization has progressed under German engineer Bernhard Blumich, who created the one-foot-tall "MRI-MOUSE" using U-shaped magnets with weak, non-uniform magnetic fields.
• Ultrasound has seen the most dramatic miniaturization, with FDA-approved pocket devices like VScan and Mobisante producing images comparable to $300,000 hospital machines.
These devices allow physicians to see heart structure and function in real time during examinations, rendering the traditional stethoscope obsolete. Some medical schools now provide these devices to first-year students instead of stethoscopes, and health systems are training physicians to conduct comprehensive ultrasound physical examinations.
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The Fight for Your Medical Data
We've developed remarkable capabilities to generate medical data about individuals-from lab tests to wireless sensors, genomic information, and images-but our systems for managing this information remain woefully inadequate. The fundamental issue is one of ownership versus access: patients are the rightful owners of their medical information since they paid for the tests and it's their body, yet the medical profession has traditionally controlled this data, citing concerns about patient confusion or malpractice litigation.
Getting access to one's medical records remains one of healthcare's most frustrating experiences, often requiring signed releases, exorbitant per-page fees, and long waits for faxed documents. This problem isn't new-forty-two years ago, Shenkin and Warner wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about giving patients their medical records, noting that in most exchanges, a purchased product becomes the purchaser's property.
The OpenNotes research project tested giving patients rapid access to their office visit notes across three major medical centers. Despite initial physician concerns about workflow disruption and patient anxiety, the results were overwhelmingly positive. For patients, the benefits were striking-99% wanted continued access, with nearly 90% indicating they would select future care based on having open note access. The access improved their understanding, sense of control, medication adherence (by 65%), and trust in physicians. Despite these positive outcomes, by 2014 only two million U.S. patients had access to their treatment notes, as paternalism continues to dominate-only 31% of physicians believe patients should have full access to their notes, though 84% of consumers believe it is their right.
The Blue Button initiative emerged in 2010 when the Markle Foundation partnered with the US government to enable individuals to download their health data. Initially serving over sixty million Americans through government agencies like Veterans Affairs, it expanded to private insurers by 2012, theoretically giving over one hundred million Americans access to their medical data. However, the data comes from administrative databases designed for claims processing rather than patient use, making it difficult to navigate.
The fragmentation of electronic medical record systems-with over 1,000 certified vendors using incompatible proprietary software-has prevented the creation of truly accessible, comprehensive patient-centric records. Despite federal requirements for electronic records by 2015, we remain in a primitive stage, with Dr. Jan Walker comparing the current state to "the Model T stage of transparency."
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The Cost Crisis in American Healthcare
The $2.8 trillion American healthcare system-consuming 18% of GDP-represents perhaps medicine's most despicable aspect. Steven Brill's unprecedented 36-page TIME magazine expose "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us" examined hundreds of bills revealing outrageous pricing and egregious profits, with hospitals charging up to $1,200 for every $100 of their costs through mysterious "chargemaster" price lists.
American healthcare represents a market unlike any other. Patients rarely know what they've been charged or what their insurer actually paid. We pay fee-for-service rather than rewarding health preservation-"medicine by the yard." With employer-based insurance for most consumers, patients lack incentive to drive costs down. As health economist Uwe Reinhardt noted, purchasing healthcare is like "blindfolding shoppers entering a department store in the hope that inside they can and will then shop smartly."
The Institute of Medicine's 2012 report "Best Care at Lower Cost" revealed that one-third of our nearly $3 trillion annual healthcare expenditure-over 6% of U.S. GDP-is waste. This includes over $210 billion in unnecessary services like unneeded procedures and operations.
Many common procedures have been deemed ineffective or "low value." For example, arthroscopic partial meniscectomy-the most common operation in America with 700,000 performed yearly at $4 billion-was shown in a randomized trial to be no more effective than sham surgery. The system even creates perverse incentives-surgical complications lead to higher reimbursement. A study of 34,000 surgeries showed that while uncomplicated operations averaged $16,936 in reimbursement, those with complications averaged $39,017-essentially rewarding poor outcomes.
Americans spend twice as much per capita on healthcare ($8,500) as other wealthy nations, yet rank last in overall health outcomes. The other ten wealthiest nations average just $3,100 per person-63% less. This cost disparity has fueled medical tourism, with patients seeking care abroad. The price differences are staggering: a hip replacement that would cost $100,000 in Colorado was completed for $13,660 all-inclusive in Brussels.
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The Virtual Doctor Will See You Now
Physical office visits are rapidly becoming obsolete as virtual healthcare gains popularity. A Cisco survey found 70% of Americans prefer virtual doctor visits, unsurprising given the typical in-person experience involves a 62-minute wait for just 7-12 minutes with a doctor who's mostly typing into an electronic record.
Insurers are embracing this shift: Health Partners' web-based Virtuwell platform reduced costs by $88 per visit; United Healthcare offers NowClinic for immediate physician access; and Kaiser Permanente projects virtual visits will exceed physical ones by 2016. Numerous companies now offer immediate virtual consultations, including Doctor on Demand, MD Live, American Well, and Teladoc, typically charging about $40 for a 15-20 minute consultation.
Smartphone medicine transforms the doctor-patient relationship by creating data-enriched interactions. Patients become active data-gatherers, collecting and processing their own health information before consultations. For example, asthma patients can use smartphone add-ons to track environmental triggers (pollen, air quality, temperature), vital signs, and lung function, revealing that specific combinations (like cold air with exercise during poor air quality) trigger attacks. This enables personalized prevention strategies and reduced medication use.
The digital revolution threatens to marginalize physicians who resist adaptation. Technology leaders predict automation of information-intensive jobs regardless of profession, with one emergency physician comparing current medical practice to an outdated Radio Shack store. New technologies like Johnson & Johnson's Sedasys (computerized sedation) and IBM Watson (cancer diagnosis) directly challenge specialist roles.
What if physicians embraced the microcomputer to transfer responsibility for data generation, surveillance, and disease management to patients? "Letting go" means physicians becoming ready for patients to take charge. Doctors can compete on performance by adapting to democratized medicine-supporting email communication, mobile devices, patient-generated data, social health networks, shared notes, and consumer-driven healthcare. This liberates physicians while empowering patients, without sacrificing human compassion.
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Hospitals Without Beds: The Changing Healthcare Landscape
The hospital system is undergoing radical transformation as procedures once requiring lengthy stays now become outpatient services. Cardiac catheterization exemplifies this shift-what once required three hospital days in the 1980s is now an outpatient procedure with patients walking away hours later. Similar transformations have occurred with knee replacements, gallbladder removals, and many spinal procedures. This trend has contributed to a 30% decline in US hospitals since 1975, from 7,156 to 4,995 in 2013-and this is just the beginning of hospital attrition. Small community hospitals have been particularly affected, with many merging into larger health systems or closing entirely.
Hospitals pose alarming safety risks that often go underreported. A 2013 review in the Journal of Patient Safety estimated approximately 440,000 lethal, preventable events annually, roughly one-sixth of all US deaths. These include medication errors, hospital-acquired infections, surgical mistakes, and diagnostic errors. Unlike airplane crashes that trigger immediate investigations and safety improvements, hospital deaths-equivalent to four jumbo jets of patients weekly-receive little public notice or investigation. Despite mandatory reporting requirements, many incidents go unreported or are classified differently to avoid scrutiny.
The harm hospitals cause is matched by their staggering expense-over $850 billion annually, representing 33% of all US healthcare spending. At $4,300 per day (nearly triple Australia's $1,400), American hospital costs rival luxury hotels, with designs increasingly resembling five-star accommodations. Modern hospitals feature private rooms, room service-style dining, healing gardens, and advanced entertainment systems. Most hospital CEOs now acknowledge a burst "hospital-building bubble" with 40-50% excess bed capacity, leading to inefficient resource allocation and unnecessary overhead costs.
The hospital room of the future will be the bedroom, equipped with sophisticated monitoring technology. Smart medical homes can incorporate continuous biosensor monitoring, smartphone-enabled examinations, treatment adherence tools, emergency response systems, and even floor sensors to monitor gait. These systems can detect falls, track medication compliance, monitor vital signs, and alert healthcare providers to concerning changes. Swedish researchers have already tested such systems for over a year, collecting nearly 100,000 sensor data days from 15,000 distinct sensors monitoring everything from mattress pressure to room motion. The data collected helps predict potential health issues before they become emergencies.
While intensive care units, emergency rooms, surgical facilities, and diagnostic centers will remain essential, the majority of hospital floor space-non-ICU rooms-will become unnecessary. Hospitals could transform into data and information resource centers with "hospitalists" evolving into tech-savvy "home-ists"-geeks with compassion who monitor patients remotely. These professionals will combine medical expertise with data analysis skills, managing multiple patients simultaneously through sophisticated monitoring systems. This shift will require new training programs, regulatory frameworks, and reimbursement models to support home-based care delivery.
The transition to home-based care will also necessitate new approaches to emergency response, with mobile acute care units and specialized transport systems bridging the gap between home and hospital when needed. Insurance companies and healthcare systems are already piloting programs that bring hospital-level care directly to patients' homes, reporting better outcomes and higher patient satisfaction at lower costs.
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The Emancipated Medical Consumer
Medicine stands at the cusp of transformation more profound than the stethoscope's invention in 1816-a device that faced twenty years of fierce resistance before acceptance. Today's digitized, unplugged medicine represents the ultimate democratization: a formula for patient freedom from medical paternalism that has dominated since Hippocrates.
Just as driverless cars eliminate blind spots with 360-degree sensors, patients can now capture their own medical data in real-time, moving from behind the "big truck" of doctor-dominated care to the driver's seat. While we're heading toward more autonomous patients, truly "doctorless" medicine isn't the destination. Many diagnostic functions-from ECGs to sleep apnea detection-will bypass traditional doctor-dependent operations through smartphone-connected algorithms. Home monitoring represents technology's sweet spot, allowing patients to manage conditions like hypertension with continuous feedback and contextual understanding of their own data.
Walter Cannon's 1932 concept of homeostasis revolutionized our understanding of human physiology. Now we're ready for a new dimension of human homeostasis where individuals can have direct feedback loops with their medical data. Unlike the body's intrinsic regulation systems, these external mechanisms allow people to achieve steady states through continuous feedback-monitoring blood pressure, determining salt sensitivity, tracking effects of diet, exercise, sleep, and medications.
Throughout this book, I've emphasized data ownership in our increasingly data-driven economy. Ownership of property is central to emancipation-each person should own their medical data. This isn't about intellectual property but "body property." True ownership requires protection; data cannot be used or disseminated without consent, and with rising data theft, new security methods are desperately needed.
The road to medical emancipation is within reach. The technology to digitize humans is here and evolving rapidly, but implementation requires bringing interdependent forces together through what I call the "iMedicine Galaxy" model-patients, companies, employers, doctors, government, and data scientists forming a gravitational system like stars in a galaxy, each affecting all others.
We're approaching an era when anyone with a mobile signal can access medical care, when medicine is no longer paternalistic but data-driven, with individuals making their own choices. The biggest question isn't if this transformation will happen, but when. If just one major force exerts itself, change could come quickly-perhaps triggered by someone like Angelina Jolie, or perhaps by you.
