endoplasmatic reticulum?
Bias in the ER
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Bias in the ER
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a professor in undergrad who worked on order entry research. He talked about one of the problems facing Vanderbilt as far as scanning costs. CT scans and MRI are crazy expensive. Trauma patient comes in, doc orders a CT scan, it comes back and he says, "shit, this doesn't tell me what I need to. I knew I should have ordered an MRI instead." They used a decision tree learning algorithm and trained it using attri…
Just curious why are MRI and CT machines so expensive? They are the ultimate tool for debugging the human body. Shouldn't they be very affordable?
I was quoted prices that varied by almost ten times when I was looking for a CT scan.
An independent lab, owned by the head of radiology at a hospital in another County, was $268 USD if paid at time of service, cash or credit card.
He used to have several locations, but the other hospital bought out all the locations near them. And closed them almost immediately.
Re: Bias in the ER
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Silver plating would sterilize some pathogens in as little as 5 minutes That would be very expensive for very little benefit - five minutes is more than long enough for multiple people to use the same buttons at a busy hospital during the day. It's much better to promote behaviors like washing hands before touching food or mucous membranes (like rubbing your eyes) and using alcohol-based hand sanitizers when that i…
> That's why you see hand sanitizer dispensers every few feet at (good) hospitals, and why infection rates plummeted when hospitals introduced them. Alcohol hand gels give a false sense of cleanliness though. Some hospitals have problems with Norovirus, and it's likely members of the public who've recently had vomiting think it's okay for them to visit a relative because of all the handgel.
Most likely the alternative would be that those people simply visit without washing or using hand sanitizer at all.
It's not perfect, but it's empirically better than the previous situation.
Re: Bias in the ER
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cost inflation in the US is huge due to a combination of red tape, CYA, customers with good insurance subsidizing people with bad/no insurance, and many other factors. There's no simple answer, unfortunately. No one is entirely sure why medical costs are so high in the US. It doesn't appear to be any one factor that people commonly blame. Fundamentally, they don't need to be expensive; via private medical tourism, yo…
The problem is everyone gets paid too much. Our doctors salaries are far out of line with most countries , we have the strictest drug pricing laws in the world, and people love to sue. We also have a significant portion of the population paying no medical bills while the rest is overcharged to compensate. On top of that our health insurance is full of middle men like "PBM's" that do nothing but raise costs. The combo…
One brief clarification. Doc salaries are higher, but cost and length of training is higher too. Four years of college and four years of med school dig the hole very deep. Then three to eight more years often working below minimum wage as the interest on the debt compounds.
Re: Bias in the ER
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious why are MRI and CT machines so expensive? They are the ultimate tool for debugging the human body. Shouldn't they be very affordable?
Cost inflation in the US is huge due to a combination of red tape, CYA, customers with good insurance subsidizing people with bad/no insurance, and many other factors. There's no simple answer, unfortunately. No one is entirely sure why medical costs are so high in the US. It doesn't appear to be any one factor that people commonly blame. Fundamentally, they don't need to be expensive; via private medical tourism, yo…
>Cost inflation in the US is huge due to a combination of red tape, CYA, customers with good insurance subsidizing people with bad/no insurance
Or monopoly economics and market power. There's been a huge amount of consolidation in the healthcare sector in the last few years.
In other news if we just cut some of Comcast's red tape, prices for sure would fall.
Re: Bias in the ER
#46They hadn’t bothered to consider statistically far more likely causes of an irregular heartbeat. In Redelmeier’s experience, doctors did not think statistically. Statistics assumes independence, something that may be hard to come by in the ER. Even when you start factoring in the covariance between conditions, there's so many confounding factors it's probably difficult to tease out any sort of significant r^2 for an…
I had a professor in undergrad who worked on order entry research. He talked about one of the problems facing Vanderbilt as far as scanning costs. CT scans and MRI are crazy expensive. Trauma patient comes in, doc orders a CT scan, it comes back and he says, "shit, this doesn't tell me what I need to. I knew I should have ordered an MRI instead." They used a decision tree learning algorithm and trained it using attri…
As a side note, MRIs do not have to be expensive: grad students at research universities do them (for research, not on real patients) and the costs are nothing like at the numbers you see on medical bills.
Re: Bias in the ER
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cost inflation in the US is huge due to a combination of red tape, CYA, customers with good insurance subsidizing people with bad/no insurance, and many other factors. There's no simple answer, unfortunately. No one is entirely sure why medical costs are so high in the US. It doesn't appear to be any one factor that people commonly blame. Fundamentally, they don't need to be expensive; via private medical tourism, yo…
The problem is everyone gets paid too much. Our doctors salaries are far out of line with most countries , we have the strictest drug pricing laws in the world, and people love to sue. We also have a significant portion of the population paying no medical bills while the rest is overcharged to compensate. On top of that our health insurance is full of middle men like "PBM's" that do nothing but raise costs. The combo…
subsidize the cost of medical school increasing supply of MD
Won't help - the constraint is that the AMA is a closed shop (same as the BMA in the UK) and won't allow the market to be flooded like that.
Meanwhile we computer folks sit back and let outsourcing and offshoring eat our industry.
Re: Bias in the ER
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a professor in undergrad who worked on order entry research. He talked about one of the problems facing Vanderbilt as far as scanning costs. CT scans and MRI are crazy expensive. Trauma patient comes in, doc orders a CT scan, it comes back and he says, "shit, this doesn't tell me what I need to. I knew I should have ordered an MRI instead." They used a decision tree learning algorithm and trained it using attri…
Just curious why are MRI and CT machines so expensive? They are the ultimate tool for debugging the human body. Shouldn't they be very affordable?
They are hugely complex pieces of kit, manufactured in relatively low volumes and requiring lots of specialized materials and development. Not an easy thing to cost-reduce. (That said, each scan has very low marginal cost).
Re: Bias in the ER
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cost inflation in the US is huge due to a combination of red tape, CYA, customers with good insurance subsidizing people with bad/no insurance, and many other factors. There's no simple answer, unfortunately. No one is entirely sure why medical costs are so high in the US. It doesn't appear to be any one factor that people commonly blame. Fundamentally, they don't need to be expensive; via private medical tourism, yo…
The problem is everyone gets paid too much. Our doctors salaries are far out of line with most countries , we have the strictest drug pricing laws in the world, and people love to sue. We also have a significant portion of the population paying no medical bills while the rest is overcharged to compensate. On top of that our health insurance is full of middle men like "PBM's" that do nothing but raise costs. The combo…
pass laws to protect physicians from frivolous lawsuits or at least limit damages
Several US states have harsh caps on medical malpractice damages. They still see massively-rising medical costs. And in uncapped states the rate of growth in malpractice damage awards hovers very close to the rate of inflation of the US dollar.
Which sort of destroys the argument that "frivolous lawsuits" and massive damage awards drive medical costs in any significant way.
Re: Bias in the ER
#50There's a book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman that talks about systematic bias in human heuristic thinking. > The more easily people can call a scenario to mind, the more probable they find it. This is practically a restatement of the "availability bias" from that book. It came to mind immediately when I saw the article's title "How can Medical Professionals Avoid Making Assumptions That Lead to M…
One thing to note is that the social priming studies in “Thinking Fast and Slow” are not very replicable [1] 1. https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
Another thing to note is that some of the attempts to show cognitive bias at work are more easily explained by deliberately misleading or confusing wording of questions (i.e., framing a question in such a way that the person being asked thinks the question is "what is the conditional probability of Y given X" when the questioners then turn around and say "gotcha! We were really asking for the base rate of Y in the general population!").