Future of General Practitioners in the Era of Quantified Self

• In Event: Quantified Patients and Physicians

Abstract

Dr Daniel Widmer is respresentative of the European Union of general practitioners/ family physicians (UEMO) within the healthcare professionals stakeholders group at the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) network of the European Commission. He works as a GP in Lausanne, Switzerland
Dr Daniela Cerqui is a cultural anthropologist interested in the relationship between body, technology and society. She works as a senior lecturer and researcher at the Universtity of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Our common interest is related to the future of medicine and to the relationship between patients and physicians in the era of digital health. Considering that GP are closer than other physicians to their patient's lived experience, we are working on the assumption that in the era of the quantified self, GP either are in charge of providing a meaning to numbers or to vanish in the network ocean…
Our paper is based on focus groups we have held during the 2017 11th Family Physicians Conference in Paris. We have discussed four topics, defined according with Dr Cerqui previous researches focused on humans beings replaced by machines vs human beings enhanced by machines:
- Evolution of the profession with preventive and decisional algorithms (i.e. GP replaced by technology?)
- Diagnosis based on cerebral imaging replacing clinical phenomenology (i.e patient replaced by numbers?)
- The augmented GP and modification of clinical competencies (i.e. enhanced GP?)
- The use of biological sensors (i.e. enhanced patient?)
We will discuss the results of these focus groups.

Authors

• Daniela Cerqui, Unil

• Daniel Widmer, European Commission