Dr. Vaughan of New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center explains how now, with the advent of new technology facilitating communication and learning, he believes patients will be able to start diagnosing urologic diseases themselves.

We're entering a new era in medicine where the patients are gonna be taking incredible amount of responsibility for their disease. One of the goals is going to be to help patients to identify urological diseases. I open a textbook, and I look on a chapter on kidney stone, the patient has a symptom, so for instance, patient called me yesterday, he's at an airport in Austin, texas. He's got violent pain in the back, near the ribcage. That pain runs forward doubles him up, cramps, he's nauseated, feels sick, classic picture of a kidney stone. So one of the things that we hope to be able to convey to patients is some of the information that will help them with self diagnosis. One of the other things that we hope to accomplish is to give validated information. There's a lot out there that may not be true. But since we're the people at Weill Cornell urology department, who do much of the research, who do the clinical trials, who know the literature, we hope to be able to give advice which would be useful.