4 ms·

Requiring technology means requiring capital investment, which means few solo practitioners (already happened) and practices controlled by massive bureaucracies

• nickthemagicman 8y ago
  I use the same technology for my personal projects (AWS, Rails, C#) that my company does for it's enterprise projects. My social worker friend already uses a SaaS for his billing and patient management. I think technology will massively enable solo practitioners.
  • xapata 8y ago
    Ask a medical doctor or dentist how much they pay for the various technology they use in their office. Even electronic medical records, as useful as they are, will have some negative effects for patients via the economics of medicine. EMRs are net positive, of course. Perhaps some day, the medical field will experience the same boom in open source and inexpensive services. That day ain't tomorrow.
    • nickthemagicman 8y ago
      I don't trust physicians or dentists opinions on this subject, because they have a vested interest in preventing technology from disrupting their field. Its better to be the oracle with the Tea Leaves garnering the accompanying salaries and status. >> Perhaps some day, the medical field will experience the same boom in open source and inexpensive services. That day ain't tomorrow. You're right it's today. There's a bunch of HIPPA compliant, reasonably priced SaaS's available to do just this. Google it. The obstacle lies in getting medical professionals to give their status, cush jobs, and money over to a machine for the betterment of patients and the field, which is going to be a hard won battle. I for one can't wait until a nurse with good beside manner takes my samples and symptoms, sends them to a lab/records them in an EHR, and a machine with zettabytes of data and years of machine learning diagnosis me with more accuracy than a human ever could imagine.
      • deleted 8y ago
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      • xapata 8y ago
        > I don't trust physicians or dentists opinions on this subject, because they have a vested interest in preventing technology from disrupting their field. You don't need to trust, but only use a little logic. Would a doctor prefer to reduce expenses and increase profits? Of course there's some interest in preserving status quo, but as that "Cult of the Root Cause" [0] article pointed out, there can be many system dynamics working simultaneously. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109114
        • nickthemagicman 8y ago
          I agree they would prefer to reduce expenses and increase profits however that's not what the long term outcome of medical automation is going to do. It's going to put them out of business.
          • xapata 8y ago
            Exactly, enabling the market to be controlled by a handful of large corporations, which has some negative consequences for patients (in addition to the benefits of technology). Just consider all the conversations people have about Google. Life is just so much better with Google Search and YouTube -- learning things is so easy now. Yet, there are some nagging doubts about what we gave up to have that access to information.
            • nickthemagicman 8y ago
              It could go numerous ways. It could be centralized, it could be a bunch of contractors working for a large corporation like uber health, or technology could do what it did for the record industry and enable the small provider.
• mr_toad 8y ago
  Free and Open source software has existed in the medical sector for decades. E.g: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA https://www.open-emr.org https://www.open-emr.org FOSS software suffers from the same problems gaining a foothold in healthcare as it does in most sectors - namely a lack of money to spend on sales, and a malaise of FUD.
  • xapata 8y ago
    That's some of the issue. Also probably some usability and integration problems. Zocdoc tells some good stories about how hard integration with medical software is.