When literary or cinematographic fiction shows us the future, it uses elements that we can contrast with today’s reality., for example, transport –flying cars–, urban planning and architecture –skyscrapers– and also, on occasions, medicine. These biomedical advances are summarized in genetic manipulations of all kinds, robotic/bionic limbs –arms, eyes…– or alienated scientists playing God. However, without going to these extremes, we are witnessing important advances with practical application today. Before he’s treated by a robot nurse or inserted into Will Smith’s titanium arm in “Yo Robot,” the artificial intelligence (AI) applied to health sciences bears fruitnot so spectacular, but who are saving many lives without making a sound.
For example, in the field of basic or clinical research, the ability to cross-reference data and stratify people according to many parameters improves substantially, until finding biomarkers that may be an element of this or that disease.
The machines can likewise –deep learning, machine learning– autonomously design new models of clinical trials that assume that the complex phases that a drug goes through until proven to be safe and effective accelerate a lot and, ultimately, the time period from the tube to the pharmacy is shortened.
On the other hand, the AI applied to the pure medical act also allows a more personalized diagnosis, but in this chapter it is hard to think that a supercomputer can replace intuition, experience, sensitivity towards the sufferer, identify the thousand and one faces of physical or emotional pain, an outstretched hand or knowing how to listen. The day that all that is lost, that humanity that heals and cares for, health will be just another statistic.
It may even be that a machine, in the strictest sense of its pragmatism, recommends not treating a person with a terminal illness because it represents a waste of material and human resources that might be applied to a person with a better chance of survival.
But regardless of these ideas, halfway between detestable eugenic theories and what movies like “Terminator” showed us, there is a third very clear application that we have fresh in our heads: public health. Artificial intelligence is an interesting tool for exploring demographic trends and charting risk patterns for the spread of an epidemic, for example through social networks. Probably, following the coronavirus, important foundations have been laid to be able to contain infections of all kinds.
But having said all this, we are going to give the reader a bath of reality. Just a few brushstrokes. In Spain, there are 17 IT systems applied to healthcare that are different from each other and without interconnection. The personnel policy is disastrous, all watered by the incongruous reality of the position in perpetual property not related to the needs of society, the appropriate professional profile. That for not bringing up the recycling of knowledge. Usually, many processes of the health personnel on a day-to-day basis are closer to the 19th century than to the 21st. I will present a real example. It’s not that many years ago. One piece of information, the stay in a hospital – not in an ICU bed – can cost regarding 700 euros a day. As I was saying, not so long ago, in a large hospital in Madrid, a public reference hospital, there were patients who were admitted to the ward over the weekend despite the fact that the doctor determined that they might be discharged. Why? Well, just because no one had downloaded – I mean physically downloaded, in the elevator – the discharge report to the floor where it was processed. The result, almost 2,000 euros in the trash and a human being who did not return to his house where, supposedly, he would rather be than in a hospital room.
Perhaps we are further from that medicine of the future than we think of which many speak.
