New health techniques and technologies

A large segment of the medical community views the invasion of technology into medical practice with concern, if not alarm. The current trends should receive warmer welcome since they now show real promise of being able to spare the valuable time of physicians from certain types of routine activity which do not require the extensive training of health professionals. If new diagnostic tools in the hands of well-trained technicians can provide consistently reliable data, displayed to physicians with greater clarity and less redundancy, then all participants in the health care delivery system must benefit, including the patient. The ultimate success of current efforts to provide new forms of medical instrumentation will depend in large measure on supplementing the physicians' own senses without interfering with his decision making process. The new technology should not affect the essential doctor-patient relationship, but should free physicians' time to be devoted to those aspects of medical practice for which his long training and experience is expressly intended. Comprehensive biomedical engineering programs composed of engineers and life scientists working collaboratively on problems of mutual interest provide an important potential source of the new techniques and technologies so vitally needed to improve the quality of medical care at minimal cost.