Opinion: Just what the doctor ordered: How AI will change medicine in the 2020s

Eric Topol is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, Calif. His books include The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. For decades, there has been a steady erosion of the practice of medicine, with progressively less time between patients and doctors, a global epidemic of physician burnout that has now reached a crisis, a doubling of medical errors when doctors have symptoms of depression and most serious errors attributable to bad clinical judgment. Concurrently, each patient's cumulative data, such as prior history, laboratory tests, scans and sensor output, keeps growing, as has the doctor's relegation to the role of data clerk. The limited time to think has led one leading physician to conclude: "Modern medical practice is a Petri dish for medical error, patient harm and physician burnout."