ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several issues which impact the entire field of medicine, creating an overall level of complexity that on its own rivals that found in any other industry. The amount of data available to a clinician for diagnostic and treatment purposes has increased dramatically over the past few years. As biomedical knowledge in general is enhanced more and more by discoveries from fields such as genomics, and as the amount of data generated by imaging studies continues to grow as well, the individual clinician’s ability to process this knowledge and apply it at the point of care, becomes more and more difficult. Clayton Christensen has provided some insight into this challenge by identifying three major stages of medical practice which represent a path to improve the processing of medical knowledge, particularly with the increasing use of ever more specific understandings of disease, treatment, and outcomes.
