Why Doctors Need to Learn How to Code
The year is 2021. Everything is digitized.
Your medical data isn't a paper file anymore. It's on an electronic medical record somewhere. Your health data isn't unknown anymore. It's on your phone.
We are in the age where anything we could possibly need with regard to our health is just a few taps away. But surprisingly enough, your doctors aren't the ones coding these. In fact, in my encounters with hundreds of doctors, I have only met a handful who can code.
But you're probably asking...
Hossam... Doctors don't need to learn how to code. Why are you wasting your time writing this?
Valid point. Here are a few reasons why I think doctors need to learn how to code.
Develops computational thinking
Computational thinking is the ability to break a larger problem into smaller components that are more easily solvable. For me, this is easily one of the most beneficial things coding has taught me. From all of the different problem sets and side-projects I've done, I've immediately seen the value of computational thinking in programming projects. Not just coding, too. I could be packing a suitcase, or building an IKEA desk, and use computational thinking.
But what about medicine? Doctors deal with problems every day, and being able to break them down into smaller sub-problems makes them much easier to tackle.
Aids in medical research
I am convinced that in the future, biology will become a data science. There is so much data out there that we can take right now — single-cell data, mutations in tumor cells, patient images. It is nearly impossible for a human to go through all of it. That's where computers come in.
Computers are able to parse through data incredibly quickly, and better yet, can find commonalities in the data through AI. What better person to write these algorithms than doctors, who already know the underlying biology and physiology behind medicine?
Makes it easier to navigate EMRs
According to the CDC, around 80% of physicians use some sort of EMR. That's a pretty big number. However, according to Stanford Medicine, 7 in 10 agree that using an EHR increased the number of hours they work on a daily basis.
Based on a conversation with ActivateCare, doctors who are able to code fare better when adapting to these systems. They often recommend better systems to administrators and take charge of training their fellow physicians.
EMRs are here to stay. And as they become more complicated and more robust, they will require a more tech-savvy medic to navigate them.
Get them ready for the next generation of medicine
There's no avoiding it. AI is going to redefine medicine as we know it. AI has already been created to diagnose an X-ray image, predict pre-diabetes, and predict treatments for patients from only biopsies. I predict that in the next 5–10 years we will start seeing AI at the bedside.
Who are the doctors that are going to prevail? The doctors who know how to code. They'll be able to use their clinical knowledge to design the exact AI tools that push the field forward. Currently, many of these models are made by people with a limited medical background. Get a doctor in the mix, and they'll design the model with the specific disease in mind. They'll also be able to interrogate the model's interpretability — and current deep learning is still very much a black box.
So, if you're a doctor who happened to stumble on this blog post: please learn how to code. And if you're a doctor who already knows how to code, hit my line. Let's chat: @hossamzki.