5 ms·

Smart/Self-serving diagnostic tools occasionally fail for legal feasibility reasons before they are adopted by the market. Consider a smart heart monitoring sys

Smart/Self-serving diagnostic tools occasionally fail for legal feasibility reasons before they are adopted by the market. Consider a smart heart monitoring system, maybe connected to a canary that will alert a healthcare professional or first responders if something is amiss. Absolutely nobody wants to be liable for misdiagnosing acute symptoms, which may lead to death or false positives. It doesn't even have to be acute symptoms, either. A large healthcare company a friend worked at was working on a smart heart monitor that for some reason they wanted to connect to an app. In their head, the app would be used by both the patient and their doctor who would check on the patient. If they have a lot of patients, that's an overwhelming amount of data streaming in 24/7. The time commitment to really evaluate those data for anomalies was too high, as were the stakes. Doctors were scared that if they missed something they might be held liable for unrelated medical emergencies which is terrifying for them. At the time, algorithms were really not good enough to catch the really subtle markers of an impending medical problem. At least according to the guy that told me this, he was a biomed/hardware engineer not a programmer or statistician by any means. Even if you had some legalese associated with the product to make this a non-issue, doctors still wouldn't trust the idea. So they pivoted the technology to something else that was more traditional. It is much harder to pursue justice for an algorithm than a human. I guess what I want to get at here is: sometimes the software and hardware are working as intended, but subtleties can be lost on the technical side (programmers, biomed engineers) can kill a product. Stuff like market research, liability and legality, and public perception of the tech.

m0zg 8y ago
Sure, there will be cases where your device will say "I'm at a loss here, go see a doctor". The point is, right now the majority of (very expensive!) doctor visits are a total waste of everyone's time, and your money. There's no rational reason why I need to drive to a lab for bloodwork or simple diagnostics, and have a human do it: a robot at a local convenience store should be able to do the job. There's no rational reason why I need a doctor to misdiagnose my elbow pain as something requiring surgical intervention (I just stopped using my laptop in bed and it went away). Another doctor ordered a ($900) MRI to diagnose pain in my left shoulder and then told me I have a SLAP tear there based on extremely blurry results (again $$$$, surgical intervention, and 6 months of recovery). Bullshit, bud, I don't - it's a non-dominant arm, and I'm someone who doesn't do a lot of throwing or work above shoulder level. It was that dang laptop in bed again. Someone with weaker critical thinking skills and google-fu would be thousands of dollars poorer thanks to taking that doctor's "advice". In fact they could end up with a permanently fucked up shoulder and elbow, too. Did you know that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US, right after heart attack and cancer? Seems to me that "human" doctors are also a dangerous proposition.
- assblaster 8y ago
  >The point is, right now the majority of (very expensive!) doctor visits are a total waste of everyone's time, and your money. Honestly, what are you talking about? A doctor's visit costs between $0 and $150, depending on insurance/government, and it is a focused encounter to determine the source of a medical complaint and a most likely effective treatment for that problem. You want to stick a one-lead ECG on someone and expect that it's supposed to spit out a diagnosis, or heaven forbid, a recommendation to see a doctor who can actually figure out how to diagnose and treat the patient. Your statement in fact points to the uselessness of this proposed medical device if it can't actually figure out what's going on and instead will send you to an actual expert (physician). How reliable would it be for everything else it "diagnoses"?
  - m0zg 8y ago
    >> A doctor's visit costs between $0 and $150 And who do you think covers the remaining $150-infinity? >> You want to stick a one-lead ECG You're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye.
    - assblaster 8y ago
      >And who do you think covers the remaining $150-infinity? Primary care office visits of low complexity are typically less than $150. Suggesting otherwise is a sign of profound ignorance.
    - assblaster 8y ago
      >You're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye. You haven't come up with a single situation where a non-cardiac medical problem can be diagnosed solely with a handheld single vector ECG. You don't mention anything about false positives or false negatives, sensitivity, specificity, pathophysiology, anatomy, pharmacology, diagnostics, or medical decision making. You have no understanding of how your magical tech device would bridge every aspect of the practice of medicine, but you make an audacious claim with a bit of hand waving, saying "this will work better than physicians, and cost far less".
- 8y ago

m0zg 8y ago

Sure, there will be cases where your device will say "I'm at a loss here, go see a doctor". The point is, right now the majority of (very expensive!) doctor visits are a total waste of everyone's time, and your money. There's no rational reason why I need to drive to a lab for bloodwork or simple diagnostics, and have a human do it: a robot at a local convenience store should be able to do the job. There's no rational reason why I need a doctor to misdiagnose my elbow pain as something requiring surgical intervention (I just stopped using my laptop in bed and it went away). Another doctor ordered a ($900) MRI to diagnose pain in my left shoulder and then told me I have a SLAP tear there based on extremely blurry results (again $$$$, surgical intervention, and 6 months of recovery). Bullshit, bud, I don't - it's a non-dominant arm, and I'm someone who doesn't do a lot of throwing or work above shoulder level. It was that dang laptop in bed again. Someone with weaker critical thinking skills and google-fu would be thousands of dollars poorer thanks to taking that doctor's "advice". In fact they could end up with a permanently fucked up shoulder and elbow, too. Did you know that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US, right after heart attack and cancer? Seems to me that "human" doctors are also a dangerous proposition.

assblaster 8y ago
>The point is, right now the majority of (very expensive!) doctor visits are a total waste of everyone's time, and your money. Honestly, what are you talking about? A doctor's visit costs between $0 and $150, depending on insurance/government, and it is a focused encounter to determine the source of a medical complaint and a most likely effective treatment for that problem. You want to stick a one-lead ECG on someone and expect that it's supposed to spit out a diagnosis, or heaven forbid, a recommendation to see a doctor who can actually figure out how to diagnose and treat the patient. Your statement in fact points to the uselessness of this proposed medical device if it can't actually figure out what's going on and instead will send you to an actual expert (physician). How reliable would it be for everything else it "diagnoses"?
- m0zg 8y ago
  >> A doctor's visit costs between $0 and $150 And who do you think covers the remaining $150-infinity? >> You want to stick a one-lead ECG You're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye.
  - assblaster 8y ago
    >And who do you think covers the remaining $150-infinity? Primary care office visits of low complexity are typically less than $150. Suggesting otherwise is a sign of profound ignorance.
  - assblaster 8y ago
    >You're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye. You haven't come up with a single situation where a non-cardiac medical problem can be diagnosed solely with a handheld single vector ECG. You don't mention anything about false positives or false negatives, sensitivity, specificity, pathophysiology, anatomy, pharmacology, diagnostics, or medical decision making. You have no understanding of how your magical tech device would bridge every aspect of the practice of medicine, but you make an audacious claim with a bit of hand waving, saying "this will work better than physicians, and cost far less".
8y ago