10 ms·

Me(2010 ish): Hey can I get my x-ray pictures before I leave? Doc: No, there's no way to get pictures off of this computer I had the pictures saved on a flash

Me(2010 ish): Hey can I get my x-ray pictures before I leave? Doc: No, there's no way to get pictures off of this computer I had the pictures saved on a flash drive about 30 seconds after he left the room. They were using some awkward browser-based system where everything was served as an html page. It was still quite concerning that someone that spent 4-8 in med school lacked even basic computer skills.Just a personal anecdote.

gloxkiqcza 1y ago
It’s even more concerning you obtained access to this system with ease. Sounds like a pretty serious security incident.
lqet 1y ago
Wait - you accessed your doctor's computer after he left the room and downloaded data from it?
- amelius 1y ago
  Makes you wonder if they could have accessed and saved data from other patients as well. "I topped up my bank account within 30 seconds after the bank clerk left the counter."
- teekert 1y ago
  My experience as well, in a hospital a doc left me with sa fully logged in console, to feed my kid in his office (which is incredibly kind of course). I for one got that "walk afk = alt-f4" rammed into me at my work place at that time. Makes me think that there might be a face-id like unlock (and immediately lock) market out there for PCs...
  - zbentley 1y ago
    I expanded on this in an adjacent comment: smartcards might be a cheap and easy solve here. Insert the card to log in, pull the card and you get logged out. Bonus points if the smartcard is also your access card for e.g. the break room.
- anon_cow1111 1y ago
  Sure did! I think you're vastly overestimating the security of... basically everything computer related in the 2010 and earlier era. I did not poke around obviously, because I was only interested in my personal files and assumed I only had a few minutes. Could I have been 'evil' and accessed other stuff maliciously? Maybe idk. Years before I also had root access to my entire school district's records and probably could have wiped them if I really wanted to. I'm not a hacker or programmer by any means, just a random idiot that figured out how to use ophcrack back when XP was the primary operating system. It was a different time.
  - zbentley 1y ago
    I'm mostly just surprised that the doctor didn't lock the workstation when they left the room. Especially if it was a radiology workstation (rather than e.g. exam room EMR workstations); the sensitive data risk from leaving it unlocked is huge! Like, I'm not saying that'd solve computer security or anything, someone could still break into a locked computer. But it would definitely raise the level of effort required to access medical data up from "has a flash drive and five minutes". I'm sure doctors get the same lock-your-workstation trainings as the rest of us, and ignore them about as often. I wonder if smartcards would be appropriate here: since doctors are typically jumping between lots of "thin-client equivalent" computers around their practice all day, could we give them smartcards that need to be physically inserted in computers in order to log in? Pull the card, computer logs you out; don't forget your card in the exam room or you can't log into the next one. Like, I'm sure they'd have tantrums (any kind of users would, at this transition), but putting that aside: this kind of system is technically cheap and has been well-supported for decades. Would the overhead of employing it at medical practices be preventative? Is it already employed at some practices? How does it work there?
  - lqet 1y ago
    > I think you're vastly overestimating the security of... basically everything computer related in the 2010 and earlier era. My astonishment is unrelated to IT security. Your behavior is equivalent to just sneaking into the unlocked office of your doctor and taking photos of your file.
markus_zhang 1y ago
Albeit whatever others said, I think it's PERFECTLY fine that you did that just for your own record. I'm not being cynical. Getting my own medical records is far from easy and I don't give a fuck anymore. Will I do it? Probably not. But I salute all who does.
saagarjha 1y ago
I wish people had basic computer skills too but I think it's a failure of software design if you expect a random working professional to know how to work around the lack of obvious functionality?
jrvieira 1y ago
They probably just meant that protocol prevents them from giving you access to them.
ben_w 1y ago
> It was still quite concerning that someone that spent 4-8 in med school lacked even basic computer skills. That doesn't surprise me, for the same reason I can't tell you what a metatarsal is without googling. What did surprise me, was that my dad had a home PC with internet for years before realising that Google search results had a scroll bar — it's not like he didn't know how computers worked, before retirement he'd been working as a software developer for one of the big UK defence contractors.
- adammarples 1y ago
  Metatarsals don't come up in your daily work. Using a computer is a constant daily task for a doctor. In this example he failed to use it properly and just said it didn't work instead. That's not really OK.
  - itisokqqq 1y ago
    Almost certainly saving the image was a violation of hipaa policy— giving emr records without the proper logging/etc can get the doc fired. The patient had a right to their images, but it’s like anything enterprise, getting it has to go through the proper channels. You can probably imagine the privacy problems if that image were saved out of the cache directory. I don’t think criticizing doctors for not knowing you can right click save image as makes any sense because it’s not an important part of their work.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- reginald78 1y ago
  Can't comment on Google specifically but hidden scrollbars mean I often don't realize a dialog has scroll bars until I reach out into the dark edges to find what I hope is there. Microsoft will even harness this as a dark pattern to hide options they don't want you to choose. Perhaps your dad simply expected to scrollbars to be visible like they initially were.
tasqyn 1y ago
Your flash drive must have been compromised. Every flash drive from med students are infected with viruses.
- glitchc 1y ago
  You'd think they know better and practice safe insertion.
dsego 1y ago
Imho, the first thing doctors need to learn (at least in my country) is to touch type. I've had it with 5 min exams followed by 15 minutes of pecking to type in the necessary forms. Multiply by number of patients in a day and it adds up, and it's prevalent, family doctors, dentists, specialists, nobody bothers to learn it. Gets tiresome when you know you're in the waiting room for a couple of hours because they are slow at typing.
- makapuf 1y ago
  Touch typing for doctors seems a waste of time now that Dragon / Whisper / your phone can do Speech to text quickly and relatively reliably.
  - ileonichwiesz 1y ago
    Sure, let’s send private medical data to a cloud server somewhere for processing, because a medical professional in 2025 can’t be expected to know how to use a keyboard. That’s absurd.
    - roflmaostc 1y ago
      Medical companies could self host their speech to text translation. At the end the medical data is also on some servers stored. So doing speech -> text translation seems just efficient and not too much worrying if done properly.
      - theoreticalmal 1y ago
        So you think the better solution to doctors not being able to try is for them to self-host a speech to text translation systems, rather than teaching doctors to type faster?
        pbh101 1y ago
        Their healthcare/IT provider like Epic would do it. And in fact some have already done it, from what I can see. Furthermore, preparing/capturing docs is just one type of task specialization and isn’t that crazy: stenographers in courtrooms or historically secretaries taking dictation come to mind. Should we throw away an otherwise perfectly good doctor just for typing skills?
dotancohen 1y ago
> It was still quite concerning that someone that spent 4-8 in med school lacked even basic computer skills. And how are your basic medical skills? Arguably, which one do you think it would be more important to cross pollinate to the other professions?
- oersted 1y ago
  This points to a wider misconception that the public has. Computer engineers learn how to build computer systems, they don't learn how to use computer systems. Automotive engineers are not necessarily good drivers either, and an architect can get lost in your building just as well as anyone. Sure you get a lot of it through osmosis by spending a lot of time at the computer, but computer science professors struggle with projecting slides from the in-class computer just as much as high-school teachers. My point is that, sure, it's reasonable to expect a doctor to know absolutely nothing about programming. But if using computers is such a central aspect to their job, it's not unreasonable to expect that they will be proficient in operating medical computer systems, probably better than computer engineers.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    I'm not talking about programming. I'm talking about basic use of a keyboard and mouse. You just expected other people will know how, yet have no basic knowledge of other professions, even those that are arguably more important. Do you have basic knowledge of your own body? Anatomy, for instance? I recently tore a rotator cuff, none of the four muscles mentioned I had ever heard of in my life. It would have helped me immensely had I not had to spend an evening googling what are actually basic medical facts. Or how many people who drive know what a catalytic converter is, or what symptoms are typical of it failing? Or even what to do when certain idiot lights light up on their dashboard? The check engine light comes on, do you stop on the side of the road or can you continue to your destination? Or can you continue, but just to a garage? Do you have to do so at reduced speed? How about if the oil light comes on? How about if the low tire pressure light comes on? How about if the airbag light comes on? How about if the battery light comes on? How about if the light with an exclamation mark inside a triangle comes on? How about the light that looks like a profile of the car with skid marks under it? How about the light with the cryptic three letters ABS?
ubermonkey 1y ago
Medicine is such an all-consuming pursuit that I'm entirely NOT surprised that a doctor might not have great computer skills. Not knowing how to pull an image out of a web page is not something that will impact their ability to diagnose your malady.
tim333 1y ago
My trick was to photograph the screens with my phone. A lot of the stuff wasn't html and genuinely quite time consuming to figure how to send.

gloxkiqcza 1y ago

It’s even more concerning you obtained access to this system with ease. Sounds like a pretty serious security incident.

lqet 1y ago

Wait - you accessed your doctor's computer after he left the room and downloaded data from it?

amelius 1y ago
Makes you wonder if they could have accessed and saved data from other patients as well. "I topped up my bank account within 30 seconds after the bank clerk left the counter."
teekert 1y ago
My experience as well, in a hospital a doc left me with sa fully logged in console, to feed my kid in his office (which is incredibly kind of course). I for one got that "walk afk = alt-f4" rammed into me at my work place at that time. Makes me think that there might be a face-id like unlock (and immediately lock) market out there for PCs...
- zbentley 1y ago
  I expanded on this in an adjacent comment: smartcards might be a cheap and easy solve here. Insert the card to log in, pull the card and you get logged out. Bonus points if the smartcard is also your access card for e.g. the break room.
anon_cow1111 1y ago
Sure did! I think you're vastly overestimating the security of... basically everything computer related in the 2010 and earlier era. I did not poke around obviously, because I was only interested in my personal files and assumed I only had a few minutes. Could I have been 'evil' and accessed other stuff maliciously? Maybe idk. Years before I also had root access to my entire school district's records and probably could have wiped them if I really wanted to. I'm not a hacker or programmer by any means, just a random idiot that figured out how to use ophcrack back when XP was the primary operating system. It was a different time.
- zbentley 1y ago
  I'm mostly just surprised that the doctor didn't lock the workstation when they left the room. Especially if it was a radiology workstation (rather than e.g. exam room EMR workstations); the sensitive data risk from leaving it unlocked is huge! Like, I'm not saying that'd solve computer security or anything, someone could still break into a locked computer. But it would definitely raise the level of effort required to access medical data up from "has a flash drive and five minutes". I'm sure doctors get the same lock-your-workstation trainings as the rest of us, and ignore them about as often. I wonder if smartcards would be appropriate here: since doctors are typically jumping between lots of "thin-client equivalent" computers around their practice all day, could we give them smartcards that need to be physically inserted in computers in order to log in? Pull the card, computer logs you out; don't forget your card in the exam room or you can't log into the next one. Like, I'm sure they'd have tantrums (any kind of users would, at this transition), but putting that aside: this kind of system is technically cheap and has been well-supported for decades. Would the overhead of employing it at medical practices be preventative? Is it already employed at some practices? How does it work there?
- lqet 1y ago
  > I think you're vastly overestimating the security of... basically everything computer related in the 2010 and earlier era. My astonishment is unrelated to IT security. Your behavior is equivalent to just sneaking into the unlocked office of your doctor and taking photos of your file.

markus_zhang 1y ago

Albeit whatever others said, I think it's PERFECTLY fine that you did that just for your own record. I'm not being cynical. Getting my own medical records is far from easy and I don't give a fuck anymore. Will I do it? Probably not. But I salute all who does.

saagarjha 1y ago

I wish people had basic computer skills too but I think it's a failure of software design if you expect a random working professional to know how to work around the lack of obvious functionality?

jrvieira 1y ago

They probably just meant that protocol prevents them from giving you access to them.

ben_w 1y ago

> It was still quite concerning that someone that spent 4-8 in med school lacked even basic computer skills. That doesn't surprise me, for the same reason I can't tell you what a metatarsal is without googling. What did surprise me, was that my dad had a home PC with internet for years before realising that Google search results had a scroll bar — it's not like he didn't know how computers worked, before retirement he'd been working as a software developer for one of the big UK defence contractors.

adammarples 1y ago
Metatarsals don't come up in your daily work. Using a computer is a constant daily task for a doctor. In this example he failed to use it properly and just said it didn't work instead. That's not really OK.
- itisokqqq 1y ago
  Almost certainly saving the image was a violation of hipaa policy— giving emr records without the proper logging/etc can get the doc fired. The patient had a right to their images, but it’s like anything enterprise, getting it has to go through the proper channels. You can probably imagine the privacy problems if that image were saved out of the cache directory. I don’t think criticizing doctors for not knowing you can right click save image as makes any sense because it’s not an important part of their work.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
reginald78 1y ago
Can't comment on Google specifically but hidden scrollbars mean I often don't realize a dialog has scroll bars until I reach out into the dark edges to find what I hope is there. Microsoft will even harness this as a dark pattern to hide options they don't want you to choose. Perhaps your dad simply expected to scrollbars to be visible like they initially were.

tasqyn 1y ago

Your flash drive must have been compromised. Every flash drive from med students are infected with viruses.

glitchc 1y ago
You'd think they know better and practice safe insertion.

dsego 1y ago

Imho, the first thing doctors need to learn (at least in my country) is to touch type. I've had it with 5 min exams followed by 15 minutes of pecking to type in the necessary forms. Multiply by number of patients in a day and it adds up, and it's prevalent, family doctors, dentists, specialists, nobody bothers to learn it. Gets tiresome when you know you're in the waiting room for a couple of hours because they are slow at typing.

makapuf 1y ago
Touch typing for doctors seems a waste of time now that Dragon / Whisper / your phone can do Speech to text quickly and relatively reliably.
- ileonichwiesz 1y ago
  Sure, let’s send private medical data to a cloud server somewhere for processing, because a medical professional in 2025 can’t be expected to know how to use a keyboard. That’s absurd.
  - roflmaostc 1y ago
    Medical companies could self host their speech to text translation. At the end the medical data is also on some servers stored. So doing speech -> text translation seems just efficient and not too much worrying if done properly.
    - theoreticalmal 1y ago
      So you think the better solution to doctors not being able to try is for them to self-host a speech to text translation systems, rather than teaching doctors to type faster?
      - pbh101 1y ago
        Their healthcare/IT provider like Epic would do it. And in fact some have already done it, from what I can see. Furthermore, preparing/capturing docs is just one type of task specialization and isn’t that crazy: stenographers in courtrooms or historically secretaries taking dictation come to mind. Should we throw away an otherwise perfectly good doctor just for typing skills?

dotancohen 1y ago

> It was still quite concerning that someone that spent 4-8 in med school lacked even basic computer skills. And how are your basic medical skills? Arguably, which one do you think it would be more important to cross pollinate to the other professions?

oersted 1y ago
This points to a wider misconception that the public has. Computer engineers learn how to build computer systems, they don't learn how to use computer systems. Automotive engineers are not necessarily good drivers either, and an architect can get lost in your building just as well as anyone. Sure you get a lot of it through osmosis by spending a lot of time at the computer, but computer science professors struggle with projecting slides from the in-class computer just as much as high-school teachers. My point is that, sure, it's reasonable to expect a doctor to know absolutely nothing about programming. But if using computers is such a central aspect to their job, it's not unreasonable to expect that they will be proficient in operating medical computer systems, probably better than computer engineers.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  I'm not talking about programming. I'm talking about basic use of a keyboard and mouse. You just expected other people will know how, yet have no basic knowledge of other professions, even those that are arguably more important. Do you have basic knowledge of your own body? Anatomy, for instance? I recently tore a rotator cuff, none of the four muscles mentioned I had ever heard of in my life. It would have helped me immensely had I not had to spend an evening googling what are actually basic medical facts. Or how many people who drive know what a catalytic converter is, or what symptoms are typical of it failing? Or even what to do when certain idiot lights light up on their dashboard? The check engine light comes on, do you stop on the side of the road or can you continue to your destination? Or can you continue, but just to a garage? Do you have to do so at reduced speed? How about if the oil light comes on? How about if the low tire pressure light comes on? How about if the airbag light comes on? How about if the battery light comes on? How about if the light with an exclamation mark inside a triangle comes on? How about the light that looks like a profile of the car with skid marks under it? How about the light with the cryptic three letters ABS?

ubermonkey 1y ago

Medicine is such an all-consuming pursuit that I'm entirely NOT surprised that a doctor might not have great computer skills. Not knowing how to pull an image out of a web page is not something that will impact their ability to diagnose your malady.

tim333 1y ago

My trick was to photograph the screens with my phone. A lot of the stuff wasn't html and genuinely quite time consuming to figure how to send.