Occupational Health and the Digital Economy

Digital economy refers to business on the internet. However Digital Economy is more commonly given to mean all business sectors that have been disrupted by digital technology. Examples are banking, travel, insurance whereas education and medicine for example have not seen significant disruption on this scale (yet). The digital economy is the transition of business sectors in response to disruptive technologies that use the internet but also rely on allied technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence electronic sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT). Cheap computer chips and easier connectivity through the internet have steadily driven the transformation from conventional economy to the Digital Economy. There is evidence this process will now accelerate. Data is a key asset of large digital economy companies. However the ability to turn data into intelligence (such as offering bespoke advertising online) is usually key to commercial success  here.   Occupational Health clinics collect data already and indeed the advent of cheap internet sensors to detect everything from increased stress levels to benzene airborne concentrations means that the reach of the discipline is potentially greatly enhanced. Again the ability to turn data into intelligent output will be key to this transformation. There is much potential for Occupational Health to purvey itself as the intelligent processors of raw data collected from a myriad of sensors and mined data across the working world. Although the press like to make much of Artificial Intelligence replacing doctors, the history of technology and medicine suggests a more likely outcome is that technology will enable doctors to do more. Artificial Intelligence  actually usually refers to the phenomenon of Machine Learning. Machine learning works by showing a computer masses of data seen by humans and the decisions taken by humans. The computer is then asked to create a model that mimics the human intelligence contained in the data. For example Google uses the time spent on an internet site before you give up and return to Google to search elsewhere as an indication of how important the site is: and it will adjust the sites ranking accordingly. In this way it is stealing some human intelligence and judgement to use again to offer other users. Similarly computers can look at vast amounts of clinical presentations and subsequent diagnoses made by hundreds of doctors and then make diagnoses. In effect the computer is playing the role of a clinical case meeting of those hundreds of doctors. No surprisingly perhaps, the quality of output is quite high and typically exceeds the performance of individual doctors.

Clinical Health Aspects