IT and medicine

After years of using and abusing the car-computers analogy that has been fashion since the 1980s I found a much better one: medicine-IT. With time and the incredible development of IT, it has become more relevant to compare these two sciences than to put a car and computer in the same comparison.

It starts with diversification and specialisation. We used to speak of computers, in a rather simplistic manner. Today with the cloud, smartphones, wireless technology everywhere, virtual servers, networks security, the IoT (the Internet of Things), social networking and countless other IT-related fields, the technology has become as diversified and specialised as medicine. This is true, notwithstanding any eventual objections from physicians who may consider their trade to be “above” IT.

We now refer to programmers, network specialists, IT administrators, web developers and other IT professions, the same way we think of ophthalmologists, dermatologists, ENT specialists, paediatricians, etc. Everything has become much specialised and the trend continues unabated.

Specialisation in high-tech is evolving at such speed that new fields are emerging faster than colleges and universities are able to catch up with the market demands to create corresponding curricula. This is leading giant companies like Microsoft and Cisco (networking) to have their own curriculum and to deliver their own certifications that often are more sought-after in the real world IT market than traditional college degrees. Naturally, Microsoft and Cisco certifications are focused on their own products, but this doesn’t reduce their importance an iota. Enterprises now look to hire specialists with direct industry certifications.

On the lighter side, IT technicians, in particular those who provide technical support for servers and networks are often called to the rescue with the same sense of emergency as doctors are. A colleague in the IT business in Amman recently told me a story that says it all.

One of his clients had called asking for a computer engineer to be dispatched to him to fix a network failure that was preventing their staff from accessing the shared data on the server. Though the engineer was immediately sent the client called a second time, a mere 10 minutes after the first, asking where on earth the engineer was, and why he hasn’t arrived yet. My colleague told him to be patient, adding that even an ambulance sometimes cannot make it in less than 10 minutes, given the morning traffic in the city. The client’s reply was most eloquent: “Do you think that transporting a patient in an ambulance is more vital than fixing our network?”

Alas, if clients ask for an IT technical support engineer as anxiously as if they were calling a doctor, overall and typically the first is still less rewarded financially than the second. Perhaps it is just a matter of time till things change and become more balanced. After all medicine goes back to circa 3000BC as most agree, or to the days of Hippocrates circa 400BC like some purists prefer to think of it. IT on the other hand is a mere 60-year-old, counting from when the science started using modern electronics.

Besides, the two worlds have been dramatically converging since the 1900s. From MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to telemedicine and robotic surgery that is possible only thanks to high-tech and the Internet, the separation line is often blurred by the sophistication of the medical equipment that is heavily dependent on IT and all its various specialities. Hewlett-Packard, among others, has become a recognised global leader in both fields; the success story of the company is sign of how well they merge and blend.

Let us not forget the vocabulary that the two worlds share. It starts with the term virus and its derivatives: to disinfect, to place in quarantine, and it goes on with expressions such as “memory loss” when you lose data accidentally and “it alleviates the pain” when you find a solution to an IT problem after having “diagnosed” it. And when you say “scan” today you have to specify if you are scanning a printed document in your office or a patient’s brain in a hospital.

Perhaps IT technicians will soon start wearing the famous white coat when going to work on a computer problem.