fieldsgenomics, marked by the rapidly plummeting cost of sequencing a person's entire genetic code, and wireless, with its flurry of innovative health-care appsled Dr. Topol to write "The Creative Destruction of Medicine," a book that offers an illuminating perspective on the coming digitization of health care. It's also a reminder that while medicine is one of the globe's premier drivers of innovation, it is also a conservative culture that now finds itself buffeted by transformational change.The Wall Street Journal's Ron Winslow discussed the implications with Dr. Topol. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:Unnecessary BoundariesWSJ: Let's start with the title. "Creative Destruction" is a provocative term. What needs to be destroyed?Enlarge ImageOxford Nanopore TechnologiesLtd., AirStrip Technologies Inc., iRhythm Technologies Inc., Sensimed AGDIGITAL DOCTOR Eric Topol advocates the transformative power of technology like the MinIon, a disposable device being developed to sequence parts of an individual's DNA; a mobile patient monitor enabled by an iPhone app; the Zio patch, worn above the heart to check for irregular heartbeats; and a contact lens embedded with a chip to measure eye pressure for people with or at risk of glaucoma.DR. TOPOL: There are two levels. One is that in medicine, everything we do essentially is at the population level. Whether it's mass screening or giving the same medication to all people with a particular diagnosis, this doesn't recognize the individuality of people. I think it's fundamentally flawed. We now have the tools to do much better.The other is this analog world medicine lives in. The field has resisted a truly remarkable digital infrastructure to the nth degree. It hasn't really embraced genomics, wireless biosensors or advanced imaging that could be used to make medicine more precise. Or social networking.The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.WSJ: So what are the tools challenging the status quo?DR. TOPOL: The ability to sequence the human genome is finally making a difference, but it's far beyond that. By applying biosensors to the body, we can measure any physiologic metricblood pressure, glucose, oxygen concentration in the bloodand send the data wirelessly through smartphones to doctors. That means you have this panoramic, high-definition, relatively comprehensive view of a patient that doctors can use to assess and manage disease, and that patients can use to help maintain their health and direct their own care.That is the essence of digitizing a human being. For medical purposes, it's getting all the essential data, and it will be the information to radically transform the future of medicine. Many of these things could be adapted today.WSJ: What's the particular role of the smartphone?DR. TOPOL: We're all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we're still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession.You can get an add-on to a smartphone which does eye refraction and then texts [the prescription] to get your glasses made. If you're an optometrist, you might be worried about that. Or you can get your skin lesion