4 ms·
"One of the stories is about how during his studies in the 80s he built a decision tree to help with kidney transplants." And here we are almost thirty years l
by scept1c 12y ago
"One of the stories is about how during his studies in the 80s he built a decision tree to help with kidney transplants."
And here we are almost thirty years later, and doctors in the US are still getting paid $250k or more to do stuff software could do, were it allowed, better, faster, and much cheaper.
My prediction is medicine will be one of the last fields to benefit from automation, simply because its greedy practitioners have a monopoly and won't give it up without a terrible fight. Sure, you'll increasingly see them rely on expert systems, but you won't be allowed to cutout the middlemen and go straight to Dr. Watson itself. They'll still be extracting their pound of flesh from us for many decades to come.
- lucidrains 12y agoYeah man, the emperor totally has no clothes. Unfortunately the entire field is insulated from disruption until we can get clinical data into the consumer's hands.
- mtdewcmu 12y agoI will not be happy the day I go to the E.R. with some emergency and I have to talk to a machine...
- adrianN 12y ago"Please state the nature of the medical emergency..." It depends on how sophisticated the machine is, I think. Doctors make mistakes all the time.
- Scoundreller 12y agoSo if we had evidence that a machine was more effective or made better decisions (or had better all-cause mortality evidence) than a human clinician, you would choose the human clinician in all cases? How is this any different than comparing Drug A to Drug B? You should choose the one that's more effective (and/or cheaper), why should emotion or the human-touch get into it? Having said that, if you're paying the bill yourself, go nuts, but I'm in an environment where the public foots most of these bills, and therefore has some say in my opinion.
- mtdewcmu 12y agoThe human clinician would (hopefully) be operating the machine.
- judk 12y agoSoftware can't grab your testicles and feel while you cough.
- Scoundreller 12y agoAnd why wouldn't the software be able to take the input from hardware, and then do some statistical analysis based on the last X grabs and feels it got, along with the diagnoses, interventions, and outcomes of those X grabs and feels? Where X is a big number, I think the self-correcting software will do better than any human. Not perfectly, but better, which is enough to make me choose the machine.