Are the History and Physical Coming to an End?

As far back as the 1970s, doctors have pondered whether one day, as medical technology barrels ahead, the patient history and physical examination (H&P) would eventually become obsolete. And yet, we were all told in medical school that a proper history is enough to make X percent of diagnoses, which increases further when you work in physical findings. But today we are on the brink of the era of multiomics, a term encompassing the numerous data available for patients, from genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, microbiomics, metabolomics, and an array of other omics. These days, a health dataset from a single patient can be immense, to be sure. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, however, are making it possible to organize and filter multiomic data from a patient in ways that make them useful to physicians--ways that can personalize diagnosis and care, and bypass the often imperfect recollections of patients and patients' families obtained during a history.