The ability to diagnose an imminent heart attack has long been considered the holy grail of cardiovascular medicine.

The digitization of human beings will make a parody out of doctor knows best.

The stethoscope for listening to the heart is over. It's obsolete.

For diabetes in particular, we know there's a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn't that be great?

The problem is that it takes physicians so long to accept a radical change. And the lag is unacceptable.

I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. 'Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.' So they're looking at it with me. Normally a patient is tested by an ultrasonographer who is not allowed to tell them anything.

The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.

Not only can consumers handle their personal genetic information, but they are getting genomically oriented and anchored about such data.

There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the U.S. each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging.

For people who have heart disease, statins are great. But if all you've had is high cholesterol, what you're doing is taking this 1/100 chance of getting a benefit and offsetting it with 1/200 chance of getting diabetes.

A lot of the diagnosis and monitoring functions will be done through little devices - smartphones - by the patient with computer assistance. So it's a real big change in the model of how we render healthcare.

Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people - one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.