What’s the future of medicine?

Over the next 20 years, consumer health technology will become 10,000-times more powerful, usable, affordable and/or useful. Biomonitors — embedded in our eye glasses, toilet seats, phones, steering wheels, keyboards, shoes, guts — will be as ubiquitous as clothing. Most of today’s medical industry, which already lags state of the art innovations in medical technique and technology by an average 17 years, will be overwhelmed, then disintermediated. Google will be medicine’s new waiting room, and AI, assisted by nurses and PAs, will do most doctoring.

Eight essays spelling this out:

Overview of my health journey following a pulmonary embolism.

My night in the emergency room.

Looking for a smoking gun, 23andme finds no clotting genes, but does reval some surprises about my personality and eating habits.

A New Yorker cartoon sums up medicine’s future.

Exponential change ahead in devices, granularity, volume, utilization, software.

Individuals and communities will demand more.

The industry of medicine already lags in adopting innovations by 17 years.

Medicine is another information processing machine on the verge of being disintermediated by mutating consumer demands and tech innovation.

Based on the above, ten likely frontiers of healthcare change.