Should Dr. Robot replace Dr. Mom in providing primary health care?

Healthcare

Should Dr. Robot replace Dr. Mom in providing primary health care?

The Washington Post

by JOANN WEINER | The Washington Post

America faces a projected overall shortage of 130,600 physicians (including 65,800 primary care physicians) by 2025, according to the American Academy of Medical Colleges. This shortage is caused by the increased demand created by the up to 50 million uninsured people who may now decide to seek health care due to the Affordable Care Act, and to the fall in the supply of physician services that is partly due to changes in the physician workforce.

The looming shortage of physicians, especially in the primary care area, coupled with the rising demand for medical services, poses a severe challenge for the American health-care system.

There’s an innovative solution to the shortage — allow robots to handle many of the routine, low-skilled medical tasks so that doctors’ time can be freed up for more complicated medical issues. University of California at Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong has noted that robots can now do lots of things that only humans could do, such as manipulating fine objects and interacting with humans.

There’s one area, however, where humans seem destined to maintain an advantage over robots, and that’s “thinking of new things to do, and thinking of better ways to do things,” according to DeLong.

In the medical profession, this line of thinking means that robots should be hired to do the routine stuff, like analyzing blood tests, while humans should use their skill to for conducting research to devise new medical treatments or, importantly, to use patient interaction to think of better ways to treat the patient. For the moment, however, it seems that Dr. Robot’s time may have arrived.......

Joann Weiner teaches economics at George Washington University. She has written for Bloomberg, Politics Daily, and Tax Analysts and worked as an economist at the U.S. Treasury Department. Follow her on Twitter @DCEcon.

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