In a new advance in telemedicine, robotic doctors are starting to make rounds in a London hospital:

A London hospital has two new members of staff — two robotic "doctors" that can carry out ward rounds in place of human physicians.

The robots will be trialed in a general surgery ward and the accident and emergency department at St Mary's Hospital. They will also be used for surgical training for junior doctors at London's Imperial College.

Called "Remote Presence," or RP6 for short, the robots stand in for a human doctor, who controls the machine remotely.

The robots, which cost £50,000 ($88,000) each, operate with a wireless-based system, using a broadband Internet connection. They allow two-way, audio-visual interaction between doctor and patient to take place in real-time.

Ian Pearson, futurologist for British Telecom predicts:

"Gradually, in 2020, I would expect that you would be able to get a direct diagnosis from an AI (artificial intelligence) system which will go straight through to an AI-based chemist [American English: Pharmacist] which will check that the drugs are compatible and you will get your prescription — probably with minimal human intervention."

Source/Read more at: [1] CNN.com, also seen at [2] TheMUSCTiger.

Is this really progress, though? While robots are inherently cool, I would think that sending a robot to the patient's bedside, instead of a real human doctor, would be viewed as slightly impersonal. Many doctors and patients are already complaining about the impersonal nature of the 10-minute office visits, which are a result of the much-touted "managed care."

In any case, robots diagnosing in 15 years seems a bit far fetched for me. While American medicine doesn't have much regard for physical diagnosis, I still believe that certain things that the robots won't be able to do, i.e. palpation, or even more fundamentally just looking at a patient, and reading their body language would be essential to correct diagnosis and require a human.

I can somewhat understand using a robot to check up on stable admitted (i.e. diagnosed) patients, but what are they doing trialling one in the Emergency Department? Patients come to the ED in extremis (or are supposed to anyways — read the archives for many, many examples of stupid ED visits). The Robo-Doc can't do any emergency procedures, i.e. intubation, central lines, etc. And initial diagnosis/disposition? I can't imagine the liability if there is some bad outcome after a patient is sent home without a human physician physically seeing them.