How Smartphone Apps and Social Networks Will Revolutionize Medicine

Self-obsessed citizen scientists who use gadgets like the FitBit and Up by Jawbone to track their own health data and engage in group experiments online have piqued media interest of late. Now a doctor has endorsed the power of this emerging trend.

Eric J. Topol, M.D., Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and Professor of Genomics at The Scripps Research Institute, says a consumer revolution will fundamentally change the way medicine is practiced. Topol makes his case in a new book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care, released as an eBook today and scheduled for hardcover release from Basic Books in January.

As monumental as changes in personal technology and medicine have been since 1990, Topol says that a true revolution will come as wearable sensors, smartphone apps, social networks, and whole-genome sequencing begin delivering “big data” to clinics, laboratories, and hospitals. Aggregated and integrated data generated by those tools will create a complete and continuously updated picture of every patient, influencing everything from the treatment of disease, to the prolonging of health, to the development of new treatments, Topol argues.

“We now have the extraordinary, innovative tools to digitize human beings and prevent diseases and conditions that otherwise would occur. However, the only way this can move forward is through a consumer revolution,” Topol said in a statement.

Known as an innovator and pioneer in the fields of wireless medicine and genomics, Topol is driven by a passion for reducing healthcare costs.  In addition to his work at Scripps, he is vice chairman at the West Wireless Health Institute, a nonprofit medical research organization dedicated to innovating, validating, and advocating for the use of technologies, including wireless medical devices, that aim to reduce health care costs by transforming medicine.

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