Have you noticed all the self checkout stations at your grocery store? One person overseas 10 stations instead of having 9 more, expensive clerks at each register. Or how about beer walls that make bartenders obsolete?

DIY medicine is coming to an iPhone near you and investors are taking notice. Maybe it’s time to fire your doctor. Here’s is an analysis of the future of sickcare and the impact of digital technologies. Your doctor will much different in 2025.

Chinese companies have been busy weaving together the online and offline worlds, trying for an ever more seamless fit. Convenience stores that have no sales assistants or cashiers are popping up in big cities. E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA +0.23%and its rival JD.com Inc. JD +0.17% have poured money into department stores and grocery chains. Some day will will see clerkless sick care convenience stores so patients can get what they need to do DIY medicine. After all, customers go to convenience stores to get convenience, not service.

Now, Amazon has taken it one step further. The deceptively simple premise of the proposition is that you simply scan an Amazon Go phone app at an entry gate, shop for whatever you like and walk out the door. No checkouts, no card transactions, no bagging.

A concerned father recoded a glucose monitor to make it easier to track his newly diagnosed diabetic son’s blood sugar. Dr. Siri is in your pocket.

We are witnessing the transformation of patients to patient-customers to patient-scientists to patient clients to patient consumers to prosumers to patient-self providers. Want to know your latest numbers? Just order your test online. How about knowing your genetic profile or testing yourself for HIV or an over the counter genetic test for breast cancer?

Here are some more technologies that can prevent you from having to visit a doctor.

Want to change your DNA using mail-order parts? Just go to Body Hacking Con to find out how. Here’s why it is a bad idea.

Do it yourself (DIY) medicine and behavioral health is becoming commonplace with the availability of online diagnostics and blood tests, more sophisticated consumer health products, remote sensing devices and wearables, digital health mobile medical apps, and community based support and education groups. Crowd funding platforms and digital clinical research tools have also turned patients into clinical research investigators and investors. For example, a recent evaluation of remote monitoring for abnormal cardiac rythm points out the issues with false negatives and false positives and how that affects guidelines for detection and evaluation.

In a recent ruling, manufacturers of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic health risk (GHR) assessment systems were directed to withdraw pending 510(k) submissions to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as this device type is now exempt from premarket notification.

What will be the impact of DIY medicine? While there will be many unpredictable results and unintended consequences, there are major considerations:

1. Is DIY diagnosis and treatment better than the present model and does it achieve the goals of improving population health while lowering costs? Does it add value, and , if so, where? Digital symptom checkers aided by AI are largely operating in the dark. The saying goes that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Will these technologies actually drive up the costs of care instead of lowering them? In most instances in medicine, unlike other industries, new technologies tend to supplement, not replace other technologies thus adding to the cost and utilization.

The market for direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests is booming—with companies such as AncestryDNA, 23andMe and MyHeritage blanketing media with ads for the at-home tests to uncover information about ancestry or genetic mutations and variants that could lead to health problems.

A recent small-sample survey published online March 22 in Genetics in Medicine found these tests may produce false-positives in 40 percent of variants when subjected to clinical confirmation testing.

2. How will the enormous amounts of self generated data created by the these quantify self initiatives be stored and accessed given the present EMR infrastructure and models? In previous posts, I’ve discussed the anatomy and physiology of digital health and it’s evolving embrology. Who or what will be responsible for doing something with the results? Will it be the responsibilty of the patient to enter results in an open electronic medical record?

3. What new business models need to emerge to sustain any improvements in health that result?

4. What impact with DIY medicine have on the legal and regulatory environment of biomedical and health innovation and entrepreneurship?

5. What is the role of the doctor as they become increasingly disintermediated?

6. What are the ethical and legal implications and challenges?

7. How to we educate and train doctors to partner with patients?

8. What new jobs will need to be created to manage increasingly complex patients self diagnosing and treating themselves?

9. How do we solve the issues about data, data everywhere?

10. So what? Who cares? How much? Who pays?

11. How do we address the challenges of direct to consumer health products?

12. We run the risk of a Sickcare as service business (Sickcare a a S) model. We would just sell you what you need to take care of yourself and then, if you have problems, don’t call us (we won’t give you a phone number of the person who sold it to you, like Comcast). Instead you’ll have to call tech support and waste hours getting your product or service to work.

Unfortunately, the research shows that 1) patients are terrible consumers, 2) there is little or no correlation between quality of service, bedside manner or patient experience with quality of care, and 3) patients are also lousy diagnosticians, at least according to their doctors.

Do we really want sickcare to be like self driving cars? Putting the ability to diagnose and treat illness in the hands of patients will create profound change. Much like the personal computer revolutionized and, in some respects, fundamentally altered our society, decentralized medicine and it’s democratization is doing the same. Fasten your seat belts. Your doctor will watching as you use the check out kiosk.