The Doctor Can Virtually See You Now
/With digital medicine, patients in rural and remote locations now enjoy much higher levels of medical attention
By Justin Williams
Americans love change. Except when it applies to their own lives. The nation’s medical community feels the same way.
There are, of course, innovations in healthcare happening all the time. But for the most part, those innovations take place within the discipline of mainstream medicine, administered in a hands-on fashion at hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices, under provisions consistent with the arcane stipulations of health insurance policies, and in ways compatible with the extensive business ecosystem that supports providers of healthcare. Changes which threaten to disrupt that comfortable pattern are deeply suspect.
But for an industry involving trillions of dollars a year, the attraction of new players into the lucrative healthcare market is easy to understand. So it’s no surprise that some of the nation’s biggest and most technologically sophisticated companies are elbowing their way into different areas of medicine – particularly those that involve big data.