| | MAY 20228UTLOOKHealthcare Tech IN MY OPINIONBy Dr. Nick West, Chief Medical Officer, Abbott [NYSE:ABT]Combining skill with intelligent diagnostics is a recipe for better patient outcomesEntrusting technology to help arrive at a treatment plan for your patients can be a big leap of faith for some physicians: for those who have always relied on their training, experience, and intuition to make clinical decisions, choosing to rely on telemedicine for a virtual assessment that will determine a clinical pathway is diametrically opposed to everything they have ever known or practiced.At medical school we are taught about the importance of face-to-face interaction, of asking questions about an individual's symptoms and of laying hands upon them in order to determine what their medical issue might be, and to then choose appropriate, and preferably non-invasive, tests to achieve an accurate diagnosis. So why would anyone knowingly choose to deviate from what seems to be working?One reason may be that patients are demanding more personalized care - they want a diagnostic and treatment pathway designed specifically for their needs, based on their history and background, their presentation and their particular set of symptoms and physical signs. The `one-size-fits-all' model of healthcare delivery, driving patients down generic care pathways based on a physician's `best guess' is no longer meeting expectations of the patient population.Other reasons to consider adopting emerging diagnostic technologies as part of one's practice include achieving an accurate diagnosis whilst reducing the time to diagnosis, as well as limiting the need for more invasive techniques that are less convenient and often entail some risk.So why the resistance to adoption of these technologies? There is an inherent suspicion in the physician community of any
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