The idea is interesting not because it is an imminent practical development-it is not [What is imminent is the use of computer stations to take a portion of routine history and to advise the doctor on further tests. Such consoles are already in use experimentally in the MGH medical clinics and in certain private doctors' offices] -but rather that it represents a further extension of the hospital into the community-not only into clinics via TV, but into the homes of many individuals, via computer. One can argue, in fact, that those who predict the hospital's role as "primary physician" or "first-contact physician" is declining are wrong. It will, ultimately, increase with the use of computers.
Automated diagnosis is one thing; automated therapy, quite another. It is probably fair to say it is feared equally by both patients and physicians. It is also important to state firmly that the following discussion is largely speculative; automated diagnosis is in its infancy, but automated therapy has hardly been conceived. Its modern forerunners are the monitoring systems that check vital signs and the electrocardiogram. These monitors are not computers at all, in any real sense; they are just mechanical watchdogs, about as sophisticated as a burglar alarm.
At the present time, there are serious problems facing anyone who wishes to automate the therapy of even a circumscribed class or category of patient. To automate the therapy of all patients, with the full spectrum of disease, would be an enormous undertaking. Whether or not it is done will depend largely upon the demand for it, which in turn depends upon the availability of physicians. In assuming that it will be done, at least to some extent, I have also assumed that the shortage of physicians in this country will increase in the foreseeable future, necessitating a practical change in the doctor's functions.
Partially automated therapy is already desirable. The reasons are twofold. First, modern therapy makes necessary an enormous amount of paperwork; one hospital study concluded that 25 per cent of the hospital budget was devoted to information processing. The usual hospital systems for collecting, filing, and retrieving information consume great quantities of time for nearly everyone working in the hospital, from the physician who must spend time thumbing through the chart, to the nurses who must record routine data, to the personnel who work full time in the chart-record storage rooms. One consequence of the present methods, aside from the expense, is the number of
errors that occur at various points along the line. And the possible advantage of putting all data through computers is the ability to check errors. For instance, if medications are ordered by the physician through a computer, that computer can tirelessly review orders for drug incompatibilities, inappropriate dosages, and so on.
The second reason comes from experience with present monitors in intensive-care units. These monitors "watch" the patient more carefully than any group of physicians could; the patient's condition is sampled continuously, rather than just during rounds. Such monitoring has already changed many ideas about the nature of disease processes [One example: the incidence of cardiac arrhythmia following myocardial infarction is now suspected to be virtually 100 per cent; it is thus an almost certain consequence of heart attack- this is useful information since the arrhythmia are the most common cause of sudden early death from heart attack.] and it has renewed consideration of therapy at intervals. For example, most drugs are now given every six hours, or every four hours, or on some other schedule. But why not continuously, in an appropriate dose? And in that case, why not have a machine that can correct therapy on the basis of changes in the patient's condition?
Seen in this light, automated therapy becomes a more reasonable prospect. It will require adjustment, of course, by both doctors and patients. But that adjustment will be no more severe than in other sectors of society.
In the past fifty years, society has had to adapt to machines that do mechanical work-in essence, taking over functions of the musculoskeletal system. It is now quite accepted that almost nobody does anything "by hand" or "on foot," except for sport or pleasure. But what is coming is what Gerard Piel calls "the disemployment of the nervous system," in a manner comparable to the disemployment of the musculoskeletal system. Man has accepted the fact that there are machines superior to his body; he must now accept the fact that there are machines in many ways superior to his brain.
The image of the patient, lying alone in bed, surrounded by clicking, whirring stainless steel is certainly unnerving. It is easy to agree with the doctors who fear automation as leading to depersonalized care, and the computer, as psychologist George Miller notes, as "synonymous with mechanical depersonalization." But that is probably because we are so unfamiliar with them, and, in any event, man has found ways to personalize machines in the past-the automobile is a baroque example-and there is no reason to think he cannot do it in the future.
One example of an attempt to computerize some elements of patient therapy is the computer-assisted burns treatment project being carried out, with the Shrine Burn Institute, in Dr. G. Octo Bar-nett's Laboratory of Computer Science at the MGH. The project director, Kathleen Dwyer, notes that "there's no theoretical reason why you couldn't build a program to carry out some functions of a doctor, at least for certain kinds of patients. But, practically speaking, it's a long way off."
In trying to find out why, precisely, it is a long way off, one gets two kinds of answers. The first is that nobody is really interested in working very hard, at the moment, to duplicate a doctor on magnetic tape. The second answer is that doctors don't know themselves precisely how they operate; until doctors figure it out, no one can program a machine to carry out the same functions. The classic situation is that of the physician who enters the room of a person with normal temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and electrocardiogram, takes one look at him and says: "He looks sick." How did the physician arrive at that conclusion? If he can't tell you the signals he used, then the programmers can't computerize them.
This situation is often held up as a kind of limit on the application of machines to medicine. How can one imitate the "unconscious" or "instinctive" or "intuitive" or "experiential" functions of a doctor? But, in fact, as Kirkland and others have pointed out, the argument is really more damaging to the reputations of physicians than machines. For, unless the doctor is flatly guessing when he says, "The patient looks sick," he is drawing a conclusion on the basis of some input, presumably visual. One need only identify that input-and then plug it into the computer. But if the input is truly unidentifiable, one must strongly suspect that the doctor is guessing or expressing a prejudice.
In any event, there is considerable interest in knowing how a doctor decides that a patient looks sick, or looks better, for, as Dr. Jerome Grossman says: "Working with computers has made us look closely at how people think."
But at the moment computer-assisted programs are all that are being used. Dwyer's program, which will be in pilot use by the end of 1970, is specifically designed to help in a major management problem-the burned pediatric patient. These young patients require close monitoring and frequent changes in therapy. This in turn produces an enormous amount of paperwork and accumulated data that is hard for a physician to summarize in his own mind simply by reading the chart. Dwyer anticipates that a computer-assisted program would "facilitate the orderly collection and retrieval of information [and] would not only improve patient care… but would also lead to the development of optimal therapeutic models and a better understanding of the disease process."