P2JW010000-4-C00100-2--------XA NA

CMYK Composite BG,BM,BP,CC,CH,CK,CP,CT,DN,DR,FW,HL,HW,KS,LA,LG,LK,MI,ML,NM,PA,PI,PV,TD,TS,UT,WO

One historian’s Frozen:

scare over A new book on
Muhammad, Shackleton, the
plus France and explorer who
anticlericalism beat the ice
C3 C6

BOOKS | CULTURE | SCIENCE | COMMERCE | HUMOR | POLITICS | LANGUAGE | TECHNOLOGY | ART | IDEAS
© 2015 Dow Jones & Company. All Rights Reserved. **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Saturday/Sunday, January 10 - 11, 2015 | C1
Illustration by Ellen Weinstein

Your
O
BY ERIC J. TOPOL ual’s discretion) shared. I thought I’d seen it all in my de-
cadeslong practice as a cardiologist, but recently, for the first

Smartphone
time, I had an ECG emailed to me by a patient, with the sub-
VER THE PAST DECADE, ject line, “I’m in atrial fib, now what do I do?”
smartphones have radically I immediately knew that the world had
changed many aspects of our changed. The patient’s phone hadn’t just re-
everyday lives, from banking corded the data; it had interpreted it.
to shopping to entertainment. Now, at any time of day or night, you can

Will See You

Medicine is next. With inno- demand and get a secure video consultation
vative digital technologies, with a doctor via smartphone at the same cost
cloud computing and machine (about $30-$40) as the typical copay charge
learning, the medicalized through employer health plans. This may seem
smartphone is going to upend exotic now, but several large consulting

Now
every aspect of health care. And the end result
will be that you, the patient, are about to take
center stage for the first time.
With the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful
new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear
infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor
mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs,
speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients.
Digital avatars won’t replace physicians: You will still be see-
ing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically
altered. (I consult for several companies on many of the is-
sues discussed here.)
All of this raises serious issues about hacking and personal
privacy that haven’t yet been addressed—and the accuracy of
all of these tools needs to be tested. People are also right to
worry that the patient-doctor relationship could be eroded,
diminishing the human touch in medicine. But the transfor-
firms—including Deloitte and Pricewater-
houseCoopers—have forecast that virtual phy-
sician visits (replacing physical office visits) will soon become
the norm. Deloitte says that as many as one in six doctor vis-
its were already virtual in 2014. In many U.S. cities, you can
even use a mobile app to request a doctor’s house call during
which a physician would not only provide a consultation but
From phone attachments that could even perform procedures, such as suturing a wound,
which would have usually required an expensive emergency
can diagnose an ear infection to room visit.
apps that can monitor your Many surveys show that most consumers want to get in-
formation about the actual costs of their care from their doc-
mental health, a range of new tors but can’t get it. Going forward, what things cost will no
high-tech tools promises to tilt longer be the great unmentionable hanging over medicine:
Cost-transparency apps for your smartphone already exist
health-care control from Please turn to the next page

mation is already under way.
Let’s say you have a rash that you need examined. Today,
you can snap a picture of it with your smartphone and down-
load an app to process the image. Within minutes, a dedicated
computer algorithm can text you your diagnosis. That message
could include next steps, such as recommending a topical oint-
ment or a visit to a dermatologist for further assessment.
Smartphones already can be used to take blood-pressure
doctors to patients.
readings or even do an electrocardiogram. ECG apps have
been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for
consumers and validated in many clinical studies. The apps’
data are immediately analyzed, graphed, displayed on-screen
updated with new measurements, stored and (at an individ-
Dr. Topol is a cardiologist and the director of the Scripps
Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He is the
author, most recently, of “The Patient Will See You Now:
The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands,” published by
Basic Books. He consults for Google, AT&T, Walgreens,
Quanttus and Sotera Wireless on many of the issues
discussed and sits on the board of directors of Dexcom.

INSIDE

MOVING TARGETS WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL EXHIBIT

Shock artist and filmmaker Some can
John Waters has new lift more
targets these days. than four
C11 pounds with
their heads
Joe and change
Queenan color;
really, really others use
hates the their long
Dallas necks in
Cowboys. BOOKS MIND & MATTER
A knight’s tale: A 12th-century Computers still can’t create a battle.
Let him Meet the
count tough guy comes alive, with the convincing human face.
help of an epic of the era. Alison Gopnik explains why. beetles.
the ways.
C11 C7 C2 C12

YELLOW
CYAN
BLACK
MAGENTA Composite P2JW010000-4-C00100-2--------XA