24/06/2021
Thoughts of Ian Morrison, futurologist
Ian Morrison, a Glaswegian-turned-Californian, was once president of the Institute for the Future, and says that what you need to think effectively about the future is ‘data and smart people’. These are the characteristics that Ian thinks future doctors will need:
• Clinical data collector: increasingly the care of individual patients and of the whole system will be driven by data of all sorts. Doctors, many of whom are currently innumerate, will need to be comfortable with analysis and interpretation of data;
• Shaman: the ‘magical’ part of healing, ‘the doctor as drug’, which was once almost all that doctors had, has been neglected with the rise of effective treatments – but it is important now and will become more so. Currently complementary medicine practitioners do it better;
• Health adviser and wellness coach: a friend who has been the dean of a German medical school argues that the whole model of medicine – using knowledge of the natural sciences to treat people's diseases – is wrong. Rather, he argues, doctors should be experts on change, helping people to live healthier lives and adapt to the chronic disease that will be their lot as they age;
• Knowledge navigator: patients will increasingly use the Internet to access information, and many will be confronted by a maze of conflicting information. Future doctors will not be telling patients what to do but will need the skills to help them navigate through the maze;
• Proceduralist: it is unlikely that in the near future robots will perform procedures alone. Doctors will still be needed to undertake procedures but probably aided by robots;
• Diagnostician: Ken Calman, England's chief medical officer, famously said 15 years ago that the job of doctors is ‘diagnosis, diagnosis, diagnosis’. That will continue to be true, but increasingly it will be a complex diagnosis on multiple levels, again with the help of machines, to synthesize many inputs into a plan of action;
• Physician managers: doctors will be responsible for much more than the care of individual patients;
• Quality assurance specialist: current health systems fall well short of being as go
