The essential guide by one of America’s leading doctors to how digital technology enables all of us to take charge of our health.
A trip to the doctor is almost a guarantee of misery. You’ll make an appointment months in advance. You’ll probably wait for several hours until you hear “the doctor will see you now”-but only for fifteen minutes! Then you’ll wait even longer for lab tests, the results of which you’ll likely never see, unless they indicate further (and more invasive) tests, most of which will probably prove unnecessary (much like physicals themselves). And your bill will be astronomical.
In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation’s top physicians, shows why medicine does not have to be that way. Instead, you could use your smartphone to get rapid test results from one drop of blood, monitor your vital signs both day and night, and use an artificially intelligent algorithm to receive a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, all at a small fraction of the cost imposed by our modern healthcare system.
The change is powered by what Topol calls medicine’s “Gutenberg moment.” Much as the printing press took learning out of the hands of a priestly class, the mobile internet is doing the same for medicine, giving us unprecedented control over our healthcare. With smartphones in hand, we are no longer beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in which “doctor knows best.” Medicine has been digitized, Topol argues; now it will be democratized. Computers will replace physicians for many diagnostic tasks, citizen science will give rise to citizen medicine, and enormous data sets will give us new means to attack conditions that have long been incurable. Massive, open, online medicine, where diagnostics are done by Facebook-like comparisons of medical profiles, will enable real-time, real-world research on massive populations. There’s no doubt the path forward will be complicated: the medical establishment will resist these changes, and digitized medicine inevitably raises serious issues surrounding privacy. Nevertheless, the result-better, cheaper, and more human health care-will be worth it.
Provocative and engrossing, The Patient Will See You Now is essential reading for anyone who thinks they deserve better health care. That is, for all of us.
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Praise for The Patient Will See You Now
“In his new book, The Patient Will See You Now, Topol expertly builds upon his earlier path-finding work and explores how smartphone adoption, big data, new digital monitors of medically relevant information streams, ubiquitous computing, and larger networks are all combining to revolutionize health care far beyond what most now expect-with the exciting promise of lower costs and higher quality simultaneously. Coming from a world-class physician with a unique perspective on the rapidly changing nature of medicine, Topol’s prescription for patient empowerment is a must read.” — Al Gore
“Dr. Eric Topol is uniquely positioned to map out a new era of democratized medicine-a time when each individual will not only have immediate access to all of their own medical data, but even generate much of it and play a principal role in their healthcare.” — Sanjay Gupta, MD
“Dr. Eric Topol is a pioneer of the medicine of the future and the future is now! Read this book and empower yourself for total well-being.” — Deepak Chopra
“[A] groundbreaking book…. I think this book is revelatory and just plain smart.” — Jim Cramer, CNBC’s Mad Money
“Dr. Eric Topol [is] one of the nation’s leading thinkers on the future of medicine.” — Newt Gingrich, Newsmax
“In this extraordinary book, Topol has, in effect, provided us with a prescription for the future of medicine. He outlines the challenges of the current practice of medicine, and gives us a powerful vision of what can be changed-and how. Topol writes about the future more effectively than any physician or scientist that I know. If you want to know about what medicine looks like today, you should read this book. But if you want to know what medicine will look like tomorrow, then you must absolutely read this book.” — Siddharta Muhkerjee, MD, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
“Eric Topol understands better than anybody else the growing battle between technology- and information-empowered patients on one side, and the incumbent medical establishment on the other. He also understands who should win it. Read this book and you’ll join him in fighting the good fight.” — Andrew McAfee, author of The Second Machine Age
“Dr. Topol clearly captures the challenges and major disruptions occurring in medicine today. A revolution in healthcare is finely happening-one that will not only improve outcomes, but the individual patient’s experience. This is a book that everyone needs to read. The practice and future of medicine are indeed being turned upside down.” — John E. Kelly III, Director of Research at IBM
“The most extraordinary time for health care lies ahead. Dr. Topol presents a highly innovative vision and model for how, in an era of big data for each individual, medicine can be democratized.” — Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts
“Dr. Eric Topol has the vision for how smartphones will play a central part in health care in the coming years. Consumers will take on a powerful new role in medicine of the future – The Patient Will See You Now reveals to us how that will occur.” — JK Shin, President and CEO of Samsung Electronics
“It’s your blood, your DNA, and your money; shouldn’t the images, records, and data belong to you, too? Dr. Topol’s deeply researched, powerfully presented arguments will ruffle feathers in the medical establishment-but he maintains that the new era of smartphones, apps, and tiny sensors is putting the patient in charge for the first time. And he’s right.” — David Pogue, founder of Yahoo Tech and host of PBS’ “Nova”
“In The Patient Will See You Now, Dr. Eric Topol has helped to define a new era in healthcare when the role of the patient has evolved, empowered by the rapid adoption of digital health technologies. We fully agree with Dr. Topol’s vision of the future of healthcare becoming increasingly seamless and giving consumers access to care-where, when, and at the value point they want.” — Greg Wasson, CEO of Walgreens
“We are seeing a sea-change in medicine, a time when the old paradigms no longer apply. As a physician and a scientist, Eric Topol has been both contributor and commentator to this revolution and therefore, one of the few people who can weave together and explain the stunning advances in seemingly unrelated fields. His personal voice, his ability to explain the most complex developments in science in a simple and engaging manner, and the clarity of his vision of the future make this compelling reading. I couldn’t put this book down and I learned so much. It has changed my perspective of what is to come.” — Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
“Eric Topol’s book focuses us on the most important development in health care today: putting the patient at the center of everything. This is the pathway to the most effective and efficient innovation, development and reform of health care practices, products and policies globally.” — Alex Gorski, CEO of Johnson & Johnson
“I have experienced Dr. Topol’s healing touch as my personal physician after a 99% heart blockage, in his capacity as cardiology advisor to Men’s Health magazine’s 12 million readers, and as the visionary author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine. With The Patient Will See You Now, he’s extending his healing powers where they’ll do the most good: to the patients themselves. Book an appointment to read it now, and you’ll save yourself a lot of copays later.” — Peter Moore, Editor of Men’s Health magazine