Imagine this: You wake up one morning with a sore throat and a fever. It feels pretty serious, so you decide you need some medical intervention. You open an app on your smartphone, access your electronic health record (EHR) and answer a series of questions. Based on your symptoms and visual evidence, the app determines that you likely have strep throat. It issues an order for a diagnostic test and sends you to the local pharmacy for a swab and treatment.

Or maybe it isn’t a sore throat. Maybe it’s a flu bug, or your child has a rash or an ear infection — you could still take the same steps as above. You don’t have to drive to the hospital and wait to be seen in urgent care. You don’t need to get your family doctor on the line. In fact, you may not even have a family doctor anymore — at least not in the way you do now. In this world, your local pharmacists are your frontline health care providers, and you see them often.

How and why could this happen?

Health Care Costs Are Through The Roof

Compared to other high-income nations, health care in the United States is consistently ranked worst and most expensive by The Commonwealth Fund, particularly on measures of affordability, access, health outcomes and wealth equality. The average American spends more than $10,000 per year on health care — nine times what Americans spent on health care in 1960, adjusted for inflation. Out-of-pocket costs for individuals exceed $338 billion, and in spite of the fact that Americans don’t have universal health care, the U.S. government spends almost twice what the U.K. spends to run the National Health Service — the consistently top-ranking health care system.

A.I. Is Just As Good At Diagnosis As Human Doctors

While it’s safe to say that the future of medicine will likely never exclude doctors, their role in the future health care system may change dramatically. Earlier this year, Sebastian Thrun and colleagues published research in Nature, demonstrating that a deep learning neural network system was able to diagnose early-stage melanoma with comparable accuracy to that of human dermatologists. In terms of A.I. in health care, this is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed, Thrun — a professor of computer science at Stanford perhaps best known for his work on self-driving cars — imagines a world, according to the New Yorker, in which humans are under near-constant diagnostic surveillance: “Our cell phones would analyze shifting speech patterns to diagnose Alzheimer’s. A steering wheel would pick up incipient Parkinson’s through small hesitations and tremors. A bathtub would perform sequential scans as you bathe, via harmless ultrasound or magnetic resonance, to determine whether there’s a new mass in an ovary that requires investigation.”