On the Healthcare Industry

My recent negative experience on healthcare system, led me to write this article. In recent decades, healthcare industry started to be treated as a profit center for countries like tourism. This led to building of charming architectural buildings, named modern hospitals that are poorly designed in terms of functionality (complex layout for the patients who need to move between services). Additionally, too much focus on profitability led to inflated treatment costs and subpar service quality.

As a result, public healthcare deficit increased dramatically. This is a problem I couldn’t find a proper solution to. The key part of the solution is not to treat healthcare system as a profit center for the country which inflates the costs. Actions should be taken to reduce the treatment costs which includes the time and money.

Another topic regarding healthcare is the lack of multidisciplinary thinking. Human biology is too complex for any individual to master it perfectly. Additionally, a solution that works in most cases doesn’t mean that it would work in all cases. I have a very bad experience with that. My dad had ALS disease. A month ago, he started to choke while eating. The choking didn’t stop for a while and we called for ambulance. The healthcare personal injected medicines to improve his respiration. However, due to his ALS disease the medicines had the opposite effect and he needed to be intubated which led to his death. I am not a fan of applying AI to everything. However, in my case if the doctors have consulted AI, a different medication could have been used.

My proposition is that we need multidisciplinary doctors who can see the big picture. They would be able consult and coordinate with the specialists and AI during their treatment. New generation of doctors should be thought to work in coordination with AI. Critical point on this approach is to develop the coordination process such that the doctors should not turn into dummy users who just repeat what AI had told them. This is also a security problem for a country. Too much reliance on AI may be taken advantage by the enemy hackers and manipulated AI results would result big healthcare problems.