Why We Can Never Have Enough Doctors

David: Great. Okay, that sounds, that sounds interesting. Let's come back a little bit to the discussion about how technology is changing the relationships between physicians and patients, and it comes back to some of your earlier, if not predictions, discussions, uh, about the empowered patient and so on. Now, a lot of what's happened in medicine can have some unforeseen circumstances, at least in the US healthcare system, where what seems to be, wow, that could, you know, that could reduce cost or improve quality may just be a business opportunity for someone to insert themselves into the system to add cost and not necessarily, uh, be looking after either the patient or the physician.

So how do you see, you know, the, uh, the role of, of technology in the evolving doctor-patient relationship, and are we headed more in the good direction or a bad one? I think it's necessarily a good direction because it's, it always - So we al- when we talk about the role of technologies in healthcare in general, I always feel like the discussion is about whether we choose to reach out to this influx or range of advanced technologies because we have a choice. We can decide not to reach out to them, but that's not the case.

So healthcare today faces a very basic mathematical problem. About six million healthcare workers are missing today. The World Health Organization shared that data a few years ago. And by twenty thirty, ten million healthcare workers will be missing worldwide.

So we will simply, we, we can conclude that we will never train as many healthcare professionals as we need, while the number of patients requiring our constant medical help will keep on rising because, not because we are getting sicker, but because we're getting better at diagnosing patients and monitoring them and treating them on the long term, especially in the case of chronic conditions. So while healthcare is improving, that number is going to get bigger. There is a huge niche between how many physicians and, and medical professionals we can train and how many patients need their help.

That gap cannot be filled in with simple HR tricks. That gap can only be filled in with advanced technologies. So just, I wanted to make sure that we talk about this issue from that perspective, that, of course, it's always better for a patient to be able to meet a physician in person, and they can build a relationship, you know, using empathy and compassion and trust. But that is becoming, gradually becoming a luxury for most of us worldwide.

So instead of that, technology could be the lifesaver, but it's extremely hard to include that in that process because we are talking about, you know, patients' lives are at stake, first of all, and then we are talking about people having relationships with other people, and technology always has a very complicated role in that. So that's why, uh, for about one and a half decades, we have been publishing papers, and I've been trying to u-u-use all my channels in science communication to talk as much about it as possible, that while we are witnessing an influx of advanced technologies, at its core, digital health is a, is a cultural con- is a cultural transformation of healthcare.

Because the way the traditional hierarchy of the doctor-patient relationship has been transforming into an equal-level partnership, which is, which is coming with its own rules and, you know, new ways of forming relationships and building trust. So all this is happening because of technologies, but the cultural component of the change is much more impactful than which wearable sensor, smartwatch or AI algorithm comes out this year. And the, the sooner I think healthcare systems, governments, business leaders acknowledge the power of this cultural transformation, I think the better decisions they can make.

Just to give you a real-life example, I've, I've, I've given countless, countless, uh, keynotes at medical events to my peers and, um, on 15, 10 years ago, I had so many fights, uh, with them and debates about why they thought that I was talking about AI and digital technologies taking over their roles and their responsibilities while it couldn't be further from the case. The fact was that they, that they had fears and these physicians rejected the use of advanced technologies, not because they thought that based on peer-reviewed studies they chose not to use them, but because they had primal, uh, feelings about them.

Emotions like having anxiety about using those technologies or fears about privacy or even fears about being replaced in their very important doctor-patient relationship. So in these cases, we cannot just focus on pushing the technologies on them, but we have to focus on finding out why they reject the technology, why they have anxiety about that, and then working on those parts before even discussing any specific technologies in that relationship. And one of my PhD students, uh, published a study about, uh, all these emotions from fear through anxiety, uh, of… and even resistance and rejection and how the use of digital health technologies and AI can create these emotions in physicians and what we can do about these.

So I think if, if we can focus on the cultural components first, then we get into a better position of finding out which technologies to include in the doctor-patient relationship that will hopefully improve it and not diminish it.