👨‍⚕️ Doctors That Code: Dr Christoper McMaster 👨‍💻

Medical Specialty:

Rheumatology and Clinical Pharmacology.

Current Job(s):

Rheumatology registrar Royal Melbourne Hospital and about to be a Rheumatology Fellow and Clinician Data Scientist in Clinical Pharmacology at Austin Health.

Why do you think Doctors make good coders/developers/programmers?:

I think we understand our subject matter. We are trained to be practitioners and problem solvers. We do things with a practical application, because our training is as people who practically apply science to solve human problems – sounds a lot like good software development.

What interests you about tech?:

I am interested in its applications. For example, it frustrates me that the best way to do something in medicine is often the scattergun approach. The best way to make a diagnosis is often not a logical sequence of tests, but a battery of tests all at once. Tech has the power to make us more efficient, more resourceful and better doctors.

Which parts of healthcare do you think will be the most impacted by healthtech in 2021?:

The everyday stuff. Autocomplete in the EMR, decision support tools as part of clinical practice, better interoperability, more informed patients with better access to data and their health record.

Efficiency. Yes, the revolution of parallel tensor processing (i.e. deep learning) means that we will have some level of automation in radiology and pathology. But that is not the big impact stuff.

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