Lots of hand wringing in the article, and the comments section too. My highly limited understanding of the domain is that the data suck, the algorithms suck, th

Lots of hand wringing in the article, and the comments section too. My highly limited understanding of the domain is that the data suck, the algorithms suck, the the process sucks, and the patient is completely disregarded at best. We don't have the time, money, or discipline to collect and code and scrub the data to the necessary degree where an algorithm could pick up where we left off and actually make a diagnosis that wasn't blatantly obvious from the onset. But there's so much money sloshing around in the whole system that damned if we don't have the IBMs and the Googles of the world trying, even though they both know better. Solving the real problems just isn't sexy. The 5/10/25% efficiency improvement isn't in an "AI" flagging charts with diagnostic codes. It's in somehow restraining the bureaucracy from chasing these damn projects with their billions of dollars and get back to the very hard and boring work of properly running their hospitals. I once had dinner with a CFO of a large hospital system. Hospitals are like airlines. $25 billion dollars to open the doors each year even if no one is in the rooms. Hospitals, like airlines, are all about ASM (available seat miles) and RASM (revenue per available seat mile), except with hospitals I'm not sure what the standardized billing unit is, but we might as well denote it in pints of blood. These massive systems are run with exactly the efficiency and precision which you would expect of a large, modern, American system. That is to say, they are more than likely to crash and derail on their inaugural voyage then not. They are not, as we like to say in SV, a meritocracy. And they most certainly will not benefit from more algorithms telling them what they already know they need to be doing but don't have nearly the time to do in the first place. When I can show up for an appointment and trust that, a) it hasn't been rescheduled without me knowing, b) that the doctor isn't actually in a conference in Madrid this week and no one cared to clear his schedule, c) that they didn't book patients in 20 minutes blocks for the whole day when they know full well the average time to clear is 45 minutes, and d) the doctor actually knows my name and has some way to read a summary of my chart that might actually inform him of why I'm there today.... then maybe we can start thinking about how adding some algebraic analysis can help.