If you are a medico, read this and get ready for unemployment. You might even want to cancel your new Maserati.
Medical Doctors are no doubt one of the most vulnerable professions during the rise of the robots.
All your usual diagnostic methods, like temperature, heart, blood checks, eye and skin observations, all could be better done by a robot. They can drill down to a micro level and they can do it long distance, meaning the robot doesn’t even need to be in the same country.
Your analysis methods, whether by website or peer comment, could be done much more quickly and more efficiently by a robot. What’s gut feel? It’s unscientific, plain phooey and you know it.
Your available hours and your systems of quick meetings with patients, many per hour, could be done better by robot. And a hell of a lot cheaper.
Robots would happily do house calls. They’d probably love to get out of the office, oh, I forgot, they don’t care. They don’t need a ‘lifestyle’.
Robots would be far less likely to be swayed by personal issues when prescribing drugs or other services. And does a chemist really care who writes the prescription, as long as it’s right for the patient?
Instead of seven or more years, and millions of dollars, a robot would cost almost zero to educate – you just download the update program in seconds, and bingo, another doctor!
Robots don’t need/want to make several hundred thousand dollars a year so their kids can go to a private school and take holidays skiing in Canada. Robots don’t need to drive Mercedes cars or Teslas, they might just propel themselves. Did you see that problem Serena Williams had with getting proper medical care during childbirth? Robots wouldn’t be subject to institutionalized biases. They wouldn’t be rude to salespeople either. Maybe they’d even mitigate or solve the global opioid crisis.
Robots may not do very well in a soft, caring sense now, cause, they don’t actually care, but how many of us have felt the Doctor’s ‘sympathy’ was just a well-practiced, fake, ‘bed side manner’? And besides, I heard they’ve been working on giving robots a personality. Hell, there’s a robot out there right now called Sophia who’d just been given full citizenship in Saudi Arabia.
And you know what Ms Doctor, while you think you’ll be rescued for some years by the power of an AMA or your capacity to lobby your local government member, think again. You personally have little sympathy for people who’ve been ripping you of for years and giving you shit service, like supermarkets, getting rolled over by the likes of Amazon. That’s how we feel about doctors. We just want a more efficient, less costly system. We don’t care what you think about it.
So it’s not like you’ll have any control – we’ll just go where the service is better and the costs are lower. We humans will do what we have always done. We will vote with our feet.
About the author – Geoffrey McDonald Bowll is a market researcher and advertising executive with over 30 years experience in managing behavior change and brand growth. He has successfully run creative agencies, served on several medical boards and advised government, service and pharmaceutical suppliers at the most senior level in Australia, US and UK. See GeoffreyMcDonaldBowll on LinkedIn.