DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AS A SEMANTIC SWITCH IN MEDICINE

The article raises questions about how language, symptomatology, pathology description systems, and doctor-patient relationship will change in connection with the digital transformation of medicine. The effects of digitalization are analyzed using hermeneutic and semiotic approaches, the “signifying” and “understanding” methods are used to create an alternative view instead of the logic and language of information technology that prevails today. Digitalization begins with electronic medical records, transfers monitoring and control of the patient’s condition to personal medical assistants, and forms databases, which are the basis for the creation of neural networks and medical decision support systems. Telemedicine changes communication formats and transforms the subjectivity of the patient and the doctor. The introduction of digital algorithms changes the narratives of patients, the reading of the signs of the disease. The doctor-patient communication tends to have the patient describe their suffering through answers to test questions. The formalization of the language of medical description and patient narrative turns the “text” of the disease into medical data. There is a risk of translating medicine into a language that will largely be created by IT specialists, and the doctor will become the operator of intelligent systems for collecting and analyzing medical data. The digital transformation of medicine is a deep, qualitative transformation of the entire sphere of human health care, both at the individual and the social and institutional levels. Digital transformation occurs when people begin to think and act according to other codes, medicine becomes visually different. Semantic digital switching is reflected in the ethos of medicine. There is an inversion of subjectivity up to the disclaimer of responsibility, which is transferred to digital systems. The semiosis of medicine is reoriented from moral to economic goals. Digitalization generates new types of relationships between the doctor and the patient, strengthens their autonomy, but can also create conditions for a solidarity relationship of care in medicine. In assessing the risks of digitalization in medicine, a point of divergence is fixed: a deepening of a reductionist, digitally mediated view of the symptoms of live suffering humans and further distancing between the doctor and the patient may occur. Also, geneticized and digital personalization will allow taking into account a multilayer system of individual and culture-specific designations, introducing their interpretation into the world of scientific medicine, reformatting the solidary ties between the subjects of medicine through the responsible disposal of information.

digital transformation of medicine, personalized medicine, bioethics, medical semiotics, hermeneutic approach, medical data, medical decision support systems, personal medical assistant, doctor-patient interaction