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Welcome to The Waiting Room, a place no one really wants to be in but is a necessary evil if you want to get the appropriate medical/financial care.
I hope this latest offering can help you bide the time.
Burnout
In a previous post I described a burnout continuum in which there are various degrees of burnout an individual can be in as well as the importance of recognizing burnout before it gets to end stage.
Would you like to see where you may be on this Burnout scale?
No problem, answer the following questions and leave it to the oracle to decide your current level.
Provoker of Thought: Artificial Intelligence
It is amazing the rapid advances in technology we are seeing in the past few years.
As computers get smarter there will be consequences, both good and bad (and no I do not believe in a Terminator type scenario playing out).
Just a point to ponder which can hopefully elicit some nice discussion in the comment section below.
Job Security
Let’s face it. The bottom line for every business is money.
Humans are expensive:
- They want raises.
- They want bonuses.
- They want paid vacations.
Humans can also be problematic:
- Can be unreliable
- Can fall sick and miss work
- Carry a litigious risk
- Can make mistakes
- Possible personality conflicts/awkward interpersonal relationships
As a business owner, if a human can be replaced with a machine it seems to be a no-brainer to do so.
We have already seen machines replace assembly line workers, increasing throughput and decreasing costs.
As self-driving technology improves, at risk professions will include those involved with transportation, such as truck and taxi drivers.
In regards to medicine, there will also be specialties that will be dramatically impacted in the future and possibly eliminated.
Being a radiologist I have greatly benefited from these advances.
Since I left training my workflow has dramatically improved with the invention of PACS (Picture Archiving Communication System) and RIS (Radiology Information System) development.
I am going to date myself (and really I am only 15 years out of training) but I used to actually hold X-ray film (for my younger colleagues it is a thin flexible medium that makes a cool sound if you wave it back and forth real fast) and place it on a viewbox (again for the younger ones, a large contraption with a light source that allows you to backlight the film).
It was a tedious process to make sure you hang the many films in the correct order and orientation even before you had a chance to analyze the actual images.
At the completion of the study interpretation you were also required to shove all these films into a folder that was typically already at capacity.
Films got lost or put in wrong patient jackets.
Your workspace became a game of Jenga as these folders began to accumulate and balance precipitously over you.
It was just an inefficient mess.
PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) was a Godsend.
There were hanging protocols set up in PACS for each type of study and the order, history, and reporting system were all connected to the viewed image so there was a dramatic decrease in communication errors as well as a giant leap in efficiency.
Other technological advances such as voice recognition software and CAD (Computer Aided Detection) have also increased my efficiency and interpretation skills.
But as technology advances even further, can I be replaced?
[This is where, in my head, I hear my viewers chime in, “No Xrayvsn! You are Irreplaceable!”]
I would say that there is a distinct possibility that technology advances so much in the future that my profession could be considered superfluous.
Could this be your next neuroradiologist?
I doubt it will happen during my career as there are still a lot of bugs and kinks to be worked out for a computer to get to a level of a competent radiologist.
Part of medicine is an art form.
You have to take into account a lot of extraneous factors that can shape a planned course of treatment or even an image interpretation.
Anyone who has been in medicine for even just a few days realizes that cases rarely follow the perfect textbook example.
There are variants in anatomy and other interactions a physician considers that truly require a case by case basis for treatment.
That being said, out of all the specialties I do think Radiology is the one that would be on the chopping block first when our computer overlords take over.
Other specialties that I also think may have to consider eventual computer takeover would be anesthesiology and perhaps pathology.
I have joked about it before, but this computer threat to medical specialties may form an unlikely alliance between lawyers and doctors because it is much easier to sue a human.
In the comment section below, I would love to hear from my medical colleagues about your specialty and what is the likelihood of a computer taking over your job.
And just like that, your wait in the waiting room is over. Hope it wasn’t too unpleasant (and please put back the magazines you took so the next patient may enjoy them as well).
ANNOUNCEMENT:
I would like to welcome the latest sponsor into the XRAYVSN family, Pradeep Audho of PK Insurance Group.
PKA Insurance Group Inc.
Pradeep Audho is an independent insurance broker and the owner of PKA Insurance Group Inc.
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His focus is on Disability and Life insurance.
Pradeep has many years of experience providing clients with Disability and Life insurance.
He represents all the major own-occupation disability insurance carriers.
Many of his clients are immigrant physicians and he is very experienced with the additional issues they may encounter when purchasing insurance products on a work-visa or as a non-US citizen.
You can request a disability quote here.
And you can also run instant Term Life insurance quotes by clicking here.
Note:
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Thank you
-Xrayvsn
NOTE: The website XRAYVSN contains affiliate links and thus receives compensation whenever a purchase through these links is made (at no further cost to you). As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Although these proceeds help keep this site going they do not have any bearing on the reviews of any products I endorse which are from my own honest experiences. Thank you- XRAYVSN
Thanks Xrayvxsn! I still remember the the xray films. In college I volunteered with radiology and went with the radiology techs to take the xrays and develop the films to take to the physicians. LOL.
Absolutely seeing technology creeping up rapidly. I in charge of POCUS at our institution and now the machines have AI and can autocompute many equations just off the images!
Not sure if technology is making us better physicians however…
Thanks Vi. Yeah I think if physicians over rely on technology there will be a loss of skills. Much like how GPS has made us oblivious to actual street names and learning routes on our own.
Radiology has come a long way from the days of film. Will be interesting to see what the next decade holds.
How would anesthesiology be taken over by computers? Thank you
Xrayvsn
It is just a theory, but AI might be able to have all the vitals and data of a patient under general anesthesia for example and titrate the necessary meds in response to data it receives. There will still be a human component required, but knowing how hospital admins are always looking to save money, I think anethesiologists may be sacrificed and nurse anesthetists may take control with one supervising MD over even more cases and AI keeps tabs on each one individually. This paper has some concepts about this process but again AI is in its infancy but at… Read more »
This has already been tried at least once. J&J had a closed-loop sedation system a couple of years ago intended for GI cases like endoscopies and colonoscopies that has since been pulled from the market. I’ve never seen or used it, but I did wonder how the machine would deal with a patient experiencing laryngospasm under sedation. While I can envision an AI-based system assisting with the maintenance of an anesthetic, airway management is something that requires training and expertise that shouldn’t be delegated to a machine.
Great point. I think there will be some elements that AI will indeed be ill equipped to handle. The question is would that human intervention have to be at an MD/DO level or not. Same thing with AI for radiology where it may be a radiology NP or equivalent that would be dedicated to the stuff AI can’t handle minimizing the need for physicians. I think of all the specialties radiology is at the forefront for AI supplanting physicians (if it ever occurs).
I think radiology is in big danger of being taken over by AI. AI is getting better all the time with image recognition and image processing. Why can’t they detect fractures and that kind of things? The ER can process the images and send them to a central location. The AI can screen them and tell the radiologist which one needs more attention.
I’m afraid you are correct that my profession is going to see son drastic changes in the upcoming decade.
It will get to the point where a physician from any specialty can bridge any potential deficiency that AI can’t overcome and need for specialization in radiology vanishes.
I’m in the tail end of my career so Impact will be minimal if any. But it might not be as rosy a picture for those currently in training.
I am one of the types of people who will be putting others out of work. I am an engineer, and my kind have been both inventing new work, and putting folks out of it, for millennia. The trick is to see what we are up to, and to try to stay ahead of us. The fact is that, throughout the modern era, say since the Industrial Revolution, the net trend has been great for humanity, but it’s been rough on individual humans. As the great Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Would… Read more »
Wow. That comment is post worthy in itself (and if you ever want to make it more formal I would be more than happy to put it as a guest post on my site).
Interesting point about burnout throughout history. It certainly seems like a new phenomenon but I guess it is not.
Nice to see it from an engineer perspective.
Thank you for the offer. I would like to take you up on it. I’ll start working on it, and send you a PM. It would would be a great privilege for me if you find it’s something that you’d like to post.
Outstanding. I look forward to receiving it and putting it on site. I’m going to FinCon this week so take your time (if you are going definitely seek me out would love to meet in person)
Great article. I think pediatrics is one of the specialties which is safe from an AI takeover. There is more patient/ parent interaction and less procedures. I guess it could help with developmental screenings.
I agree with you that Pediatrics should be safe for quite the foreseeable future. It is certainly not being targeted now like radiology seems to be (I wonder what is the true future for those just starting in a radiology residency, certainly will be a different outlook than when I did it).
Pretty sure emergency medicine is safe…no computer will extract objects from human cavities where they were not intended to be with the same aplomb.
Lol. I agree that EM will be among the last to feel threatened by AI