Academician Ba Denian on the Five Great Trends of Future Medicine
(Ba Denian is President of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, President of Peking Union Medical College, and Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.)
By the trajectory of modern medicine and the trend of social development, in the next 20 or 30 years medicine will undergo great change. Its features:
1. The task of medicine will shift from disease-prevention-and-treatment chiefly toward maintaining and strengthening health and lifting the quality of life.
In the future, those who seek medical service will not be only patients; a considerable number will be the healthy. Those consulting will not only be patients with bodily defect or some system in trouble; quite many will seek guidance on living and psychological counseling. The prescription a doctor writes will not be only for picking up drugs at the pharmacy; it will also include prescriptions on raising the quality of life.
Medicine's object will gradually shift from a patient-centered model to a model facing the whole population.
The graded-referral system limiting patients' free choice of hospital and the fixed-point reimbursement system will be eliminated. Hospitals inconvenient, mediocre, and without character will be forced to divide and to close. Their paths out are:
1. Disperse into the community: do down-to-earth community medical care.
2. Reform thoroughly, raise level, become a medical center patients can trust and choose. Otherwise outpatient volume will fall year by year, empty beds grow, revenue worsen, until the hospital can no longer sustain itself and has to close.
2. Informatics and bioinformatics will change the way of medical work.
E-commerce is now in the market. But however developed science becomes, however advanced the means of diagnosis and treatment, e-medicine and telemedicine cannot replace the most basic face-to-face encounter between doctor and patient. All the advanced means are important, but most important is still the doctor's basic skills — and a doctor's ability to use the computer is only one of those basic skills.
**3. The scope of medical work will expand from "birth to death" to "before birth to after death."
4. The Second Health Revolution is at its decisive stage; the breakthrough of human average lifespan past 100 years already shows on the horizon.
5. New theory and new technology will push medicine forward.
From China Traditional Chinese Medicine News, January 22, 2001.