4 ms·

I would like to make a personal statement to the tech community in view of this thread's comments: A vast majority of you drastically overestimate the informat

by rscho 7y ago

I would like to make a personal statement to the tech community in view of this thread's comments: A vast majority of you drastically overestimate the information processing and retrieval of the healthcare system. We MDs can all see your superb AI/ML results in journals, and yes you can improve things with technology. What we can't see is how we're going to use it. In my day-to-day job, there are a myriad of new-super-devices-that-automatically-do-that-thing but NONE are integrated into my workplace. NONE make my job less painful. NONE make me gain time instead of losing it. You want to help. Cool, then stop masturbating on the results of your unusable new oncology deep-learning thingy and push for WORKPLACE INTEGRATION of technology, damn it! Maybe if the tech community comes to understand how it can really help clinicians, things will start to change the way you fancy and we can finally end the age of rote memorization and criminal overtime for MDs.

bigred100 7y ago
I’d imagine the people writing these wonderful journal articles care more about writing journal articles than that stuff. In fact, they are probably employed to write those articles. Anyway I can’t really comment on why they would or would not masturbate on a scientific paper. You are the doctor.
arpa 7y ago
Yes! healthcare informatics is so much more than just dispensing magical vitamins, when MDs and patients need painkillers. We have had terms like PHR and EHR for thirty years now, we have HL7, together with FHIR, and we have PACS, but these terms are still not ubiquitous. There has been major developments in developing classifiers like SNOMED, AHCI and ICD, yet MDs mostly still type the diagnosis up, and consider themselves lucky if the HIS has some templating capability. And very few HISes are capable of getting the personal health records to the patient - i mean, it is more likely you get a xerox of your case than something in a portable format that other HISes can understand if you change your healtcare provider... However, it is somewhat strange that personal health projects keep dying - google health discontinued in 2011, microsoft healthvault to be closed in 2019 - and these are by major players - maybe somebody has some insight why they fail?
kowdermeister 7y ago
You are shooting at one sector of tech (researchers) and expecting innovation from another market focused segment (startups to bio tech firms), not really fair :) Probably the huge amount of bureaucracy and regulation keeps medical focused IT in its shit pool of separate islands. Maybe you should campaign for state regulation mandating to create a HMTL / W3 like standard for data sharing that's mandatory to use.
Balgair 7y ago
To add to this profane, yet important point: When you talk with NICU docs, their biggest complaint is the wires and tubes. Often in a NICU there are wires and tubes everywhere. Operating or trying to help a babe invariably ends up with some person standing on some line and pinching it or ripping it out of the many many machines. I'm super not kidding here. There are a TON of machines trying to keep the kiddo alive. Imagine a 5m sized cube filled with machines all trying to keep a kid the size of a breadbox breathing and the heart beating (or not, sometimes). It's a lot of carts, wires, amps, and waste heat in these rooms. Wireless is not possible as a lot of the machines aren't sheilded properly or are activley trying to jam some frequency band for a medical purpose (MRIs). Wires are the only solution. Tubes filled with some form of fluid are also, obviously, not able to be wireless. Especailly when things get desperate, there are liquids, fluids, blood, tissues, urine, and saline everywhere as frantic nurses and docs trip over the tubes and pull them out of their machines. You want to help the victims? Get rid of the wires. Stop dicking about with matrices.

by rscho 7y ago

bigred100 7y ago

I’d imagine the people writing these wonderful journal articles care more about writing journal articles than that stuff. In fact, they are probably employed to write those articles. Anyway I can’t really comment on why they would or would not masturbate on a scientific paper. You are the doctor.

arpa 7y ago

Yes! healthcare informatics is so much more than just dispensing magical vitamins, when MDs and patients need painkillers. We have had terms like PHR and EHR for thirty years now, we have HL7, together with FHIR, and we have PACS, but these terms are still not ubiquitous. There has been major developments in developing classifiers like SNOMED, AHCI and ICD, yet MDs mostly still type the diagnosis up, and consider themselves lucky if the HIS has some templating capability. And very few HISes are capable of getting the personal health records to the patient - i mean, it is more likely you get a xerox of your case than something in a portable format that other HISes can understand if you change your healtcare provider... However, it is somewhat strange that personal health projects keep dying - google health discontinued in 2011, microsoft healthvault to be closed in 2019 - and these are by major players - maybe somebody has some insight why they fail?

kowdermeister 7y ago

You are shooting at one sector of tech (researchers) and expecting innovation from another market focused segment (startups to bio tech firms), not really fair :) Probably the huge amount of bureaucracy and regulation keeps medical focused IT in its shit pool of separate islands. Maybe you should campaign for state regulation mandating to create a HMTL / W3 like standard for data sharing that's mandatory to use.

Balgair 7y ago

To add to this profane, yet important point: When you talk with NICU docs, their biggest complaint is the wires and tubes. Often in a NICU there are wires and tubes everywhere. Operating or trying to help a babe invariably ends up with some person standing on some line and pinching it or ripping it out of the many many machines. I'm super not kidding here. There are a TON of machines trying to keep the kiddo alive. Imagine a 5m sized cube filled with machines all trying to keep a kid the size of a breadbox breathing and the heart beating (or not, sometimes). It's a lot of carts, wires, amps, and waste heat in these rooms. Wireless is not possible as a lot of the machines aren't sheilded properly or are activley trying to jam some frequency band for a medical purpose (MRIs). Wires are the only solution. Tubes filled with some form of fluid are also, obviously, not able to be wireless. Especailly when things get desperate, there are liquids, fluids, blood, tissues, urine, and saline everywhere as frantic nurses and docs trip over the tubes and pull them out of their machines. You want to help the victims? Get rid of the wires. Stop dicking about with matrices.