Some of my fellow healthcare venture capitalists (no surprise I am referring to Vinod Khosla) have posited that 80% of doctors will be all but obsolete in the next few years, going the way of the rotary phone and the brontosaurus as machines take over.  On the other hand, others of my colleagues (you know who you are and many of you are the potential brontosauri) have said they will believe that when Mr. Khosla is doing his own home colonscopy.  I have to tell you, I’m a big doctor’s office fan when it comes to colonoscopies—I just don’t have a convenient home location to perform one.

As usual, somewhere in the middle lies the truth and we are going to need real studies of outcome and efficacy before we should believe savings estimates thrown around by so many.  The level of economic data that accompanies most pitches about mobile health products is akin to the level of leafy green vegetables one consumes at Wendy’s home of the Triple Baconator, so we are going to need to do better to justify pouring diagnostics into the home or we risk seeing the same hockey stick line that accompanied the wide-spread use of ultrasound, MRI and other diagnostic imaging modalities, not to mention all of the other diagnostic tests done at a patient’s insistence, even when the doctor knows it to be unnecessary.

P.S.—it’s a cold, not the flu; or so the Huffington Post tells me.  So I didn’t go to the doctor.  So I hope I’m right…and yes I had a flu shot and I hope you did too.