Health, Digital Health and Decision Support: Sisyphus and Pandora

Abstract

The history of medicine is punctuated by conquests, discoveries and revolutions. It is also marked by questioning. It is made of doubts and certainties. In this thousand years old history, certain recent battles bear witness to these questionings, such as quality, refocusing on the patient, medical errors, antibiotic resistance and the importance of gender, which has been neglected for so long in medicine. Digitalization is one of these many revolutions, and it is not immune to questioning. Building evidence and trust, equity of access for neglected populations, and training are among these issues. More specifically, in the field of decision support, the first enthusiastic hours of computing were followed by unexpected observations, such as the identification of human factors, such as alert fatigue. Today, immense hopes rest on the development of deep learning, and it is up to us to accelerate its development by investing energy, time and resources to build on evidence, trust, and a strong integration of health professionals and patients.