“We can clearly see that exponential technologies are disrupting cars and phones. So why wouldn’t these technologies find their way into health care and gastroenterology?
What do stool tests have to do with self-driving cars? We’ll soon find out. But let’s first go back to the discussion we had earlier on the shift to digital. Screening for cancer through colonoscopy, while a gold standard, reminds me of a field that’s at the crossroads of disruption—much like music or photography was before iTunes or smartphones.
If you consider the argument for a moment, a colonoscopy is largely limited to one doctor and one patient at a time. When a doctor performs a colonoscopy, he or she can’t scale beyond the procedure. With each procedure, the learning happens within the capacity of that one doctor. To put that into context, only a very small percentage of doctors become endoscopists. And an even smaller percentage achieve mastery in endoscopy. Statistically speaking, we are talking of a very few highly qualified individuals who can reliably screen for cancer using sophisticated methods.
Ask yourself what could make the field of cancer screening go digital? Something that can accelerate cancer screening and give control to the nonexperts. I’m sure you might have arrived at DNA testing or artificial intelligence.”
Praveen Suthrum is president and co-founder, NextServices and blogs at redo | healthcare.
He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “What does colon cancer screening have to do with self-driving cars?”
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