Medicine in the Digital Age

Healthcare has entered the digital age. You can track your heart rate with wearable devices like Fitbit or Motiv. Smartphones send patients reminders to take their medication. And according to the CDC, 86.9 percent of office-based physicians are using electronic health records. However, many medical professionals and technologists alike believe tech can take medicine a lot further. As hospitals and doctors adopt a more data-driven approach to diagnosing and treating patients, what benefits and challenges do they face? How do practitioners learn how to capture and analyze data so it can be applied in the operating room? And what security and privacy concerns do these new approaches present?

Dr. Atul Butte, director of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at UCSF, talks with the Verge’s Senior Editor Elizabeth Lopatto about the latest advancements in precision medicine and why data is key to finding a better way to provide healthcare.