The invasion of Artificial Intelligence into the workforce, education, and medicine is upon us. Rick Novak’s 2019 novel Doctor Vita predicted and predated the union of robotics and AI in medical care.

Grady Harp, Amazon Hall of Fame Reviewer, wrote:

“Once again Rick Novak serves up a virulent novel that addresses an ongoing change in medicine that worries most of us – the growing dependence on robotics in surgery and the dehumanization of medicine: doctor-patient interaction is altered by EMR and IT reporting of visits to insurance companies and the warmth of communication suffers. Rick takes this information to create a story about the extremes of AI in the form of a glowing globe that is Doctor Vita and the struggle computer scientist/anesthesiologist Dr. Lucas assumes as he tries to save medicine from the extremes of the ‘new age’ called FutureCare. As expected, Rick’s recreation of the tension in the OR and in interaction of the physicians is on target: his own experiences enhance the veracity of the story’s atmosphere.

“Rick Novak writes so extremely well that likely has answered the plea of his readers to continue this `hobby.’ He is becoming one of the next great American physician authors – think William Carlos Williams, Theodore Isaac Rubin, Oliver Wolf Sacks, Richard Selzer, and also the Brits Oliver Wendell Holmes et al. Medicine and writing can and do mix well in hands as gifted as Rick Novak. Highly Recommended.” Grady Harp, April 19, 2019.

Doctor Vita available on Amazon.

Synopsis: Silicon Valley transforms American medicine with the invention of Doctor Vita, the world’s first artificial intelligence physician module. Medical care is streamlined, automated, consistent, and costs are controlled. Enter Dr. Alec Lucas, a young computer scientist and physician who perceives serious flaws in the FutureCare System. Patients are dying. When Lucas makes his concerns public, he’s persecuted as an unsafe outlier of antiquated and flawed human medical care. The FutureCare System attacks his quixotic bid to halt the revolution in medical technology, and Lucas strives to solve the dystopian motives behind Doctor Vita.

As George Orwell’s 1984 portended the future of communism and war in the 20th century, Doctor Vita predicts the future of medical care in the 21st century.