A Conversation on the Future of Health: What will be the Role of Doctors in this Radically Different Future?
Dr. Tiffany Vora delivers a talk on The Future of Health at HSM Brazil.
It’s exciting to imagine how our health will be transformed by exponential technologies. But how will they disrupt healthcare careers and businesses? I was invited to consider this question at a recent event sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and SingularityU Brazil. What would several hundred Brazilian surgeons think of a radically different future of health?
For my keynote, I curated a series of stories about advances in diagnostics, therapy, and prevention that highlighted important aspects of the innovator’s mindset.
💡 The crucial step of identifying the real job to be done; knowing that the only failed experiment is one that tells you nothing; using what works instead of what’s fancy; persistence, persistence, persistence!
My goal was to plant seeds that would grow over the course of these surgeons’ multi-week journey deep into digital transformation in healthcare.
Then I pointed to a fundamental tension in our discussion. Consider cancer. If very early cancer diagnoses, personalized cancer vaccines, or even gene editing (somatic or germline) deliver on their promise, then there will, by definition, be fewer tumors to irradiate or remove. Similar transformations are possible for many disease states that today are treated through surgery. It’s an exciting prospect from the perspective of the patient and their family, but ….
What is the surgeon’s role in this radically different future?
Image credits to Frame Stock Footage via Shutterstock.
💡 I believe that our goal should be to harness technology to focus our healthcare on humanity.
No matter their disease state, patients seek trusted partners in their health journeys. This will only become more important as data types and complexity increase; as we face uncertainty about the short- and long-term effects of new therapies and prevention strategies; and as our emphasis shifts from information to insights.
💡 Robots and algorithms will be increasingly powerful elements of healthcare—but they’re not human.
They don’t swear an oath that has bound healers into a community for thousands of years. Their compliance with the principles of biomedical ethics relies on their programming. For the foreseeable future, it’s unlikely that robots and algorithms will inspire trust the way that doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers seek to do.
Which brings us back to people. Healthcare is one of the most intimate relationships that we have. Trust can literally have life-or-death consequences. This should be the goal of our technologies, across industries: to earn and maintain trust.
About Tiffany
Dr. Tiffany Vora speaks, writes, and advises on how to harness technology to build the best possible future(s). She is an expert in biotech, health, & innovation.
For a full list of topics and ways to collaborate, visit Tiffany’s Work Together webpage.
Donate = Impact
After a 19-day voyage to Antarctica aboard The Island Sky in November 2023, Tiffany has many remarkable stories to share & a wealth of insights to catalyze a sustainable future.
You can support her ongoing journey by making a contribution through her donation page. Your support will spread positive impact around the world, empower Tiffany to protect time for impact-focused projects, and support logistical costs for pro bono events with students & nonprofits.
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