The Patient Will See You Now: How Advances in Science, Medicine, and Technology Will Lead to a Personalized Health Care System

In a world of rapid advances in scientific discovery, with an unprecedented insight and understanding of how the human body works, and technologies available that are reshaping the meaning and value of human existence, the statistics on the U.S. health care system are shocking. While spending more money per capita than any other country in the world, we have worse outcomes on everything from life expectancy to the rates of infectious disease, at least in terms of how we compare to our global neighbors. And, along with the poor performance of our health economy, we have managed to create a system of perverse financial incentives that are paying for the wrong things at the wrong times. People in our health care industry make more money when we are sick and dying and a lot less when we stay healthy. As bleak as this may appear, The Patient Will See You Now makes clear that we are on the verge of a major revolution that has the very real potential to completely redefine how we think about and use health care services. Who is leading the charge? The new systems of health care will be coming from a partner that we did not even have at the beginning of the twentieth century—the computer and the evolving world of the digital environment. This important and timely book argues that if we marshal our intellectual and financial resources around this powerful set of tools, we could lessen (and sometimes eliminate) the impacts of disease, provide everyone personalized health care, and ensure that all individuals had the knowledge and power to realize their human potential. And we could do it in our lifetime.