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Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

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Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#191

Post by assblaster »

m0zg wrote: post #185
assblaster wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Where's your citation? Here's what the CDC says about leading causes of death: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/index.htm Heart disease 257.6 (2000) 168.5 (2015) 165.5 (2016) Cancer 199.6 (2000) 158.5 (2015) 155.8 (2016) Chronic lower res…

Notice that medical errors are conspicuously absent from your list. Super convenient: if you don't count 'em, it looks like nobody died. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/05/03/4766361...

Attributing death to a medical error instead of the underlying condition that would have been the cause of death anyway is missing the forest through the trees.

If you go into the hospital because you have stage IV colon cancer, and you die because a palliative surgery resulted in infection, you died because of the colon cancer, not the infection.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#192

Post by assblaster »

m0zg wrote: post #186
assblaster wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>> 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.

>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.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#193

Post by AngeloAnolin »

Scoundreller wrote: post #141
AngeloAnolin wrote: post #106

This is so true. One of my previous professional experience was working for a company that delivered a complete hospital information system that was used in two of the biggest health institutions in the Middle East. Initial software development was done offsite, but then, the owner and CTO of the company thought it more wise to bring in the developers on-site. On-site here meant that our team was provided an actual a…

A problem with so many local customizations becomes apparent when it’s upgrade time. You must do several X the testing and there’s a higher risk of something breaking.

Customization happens at the user level. We architected and designed the application to allow for this flexibility.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#194

Post by mac01021 »

kiriakasis wrote: post #190
mac01021 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Noone said anything about the evils of socialism. 2. Why do you expect people to refrain from using services they've been forced to pay for?

Generally because stating it as "being forced to pay" often comes with a hint of it being wrong. So the question could have been: do you think we should have free/socialized streets/hospitals? If not how do you think they are different?

I'm not the GP and think we probably should have more socialized hospitals.

But suggesting people who oppose publicly funded freeways should boycott publicly funded freeways is silly.

Imagine an office Christmas party where everyone is told to chip in for refreshments and then the refreshments will be whatever the boss ends up buying with that money. I may not like that arrangement, and may prefer to keep my money and bring my own food for myself. But, given that I have to pay in, I feel no need to abstain from eating the salad that the boss ends up providing using everyone's money.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#195

Post by abalone »

To what extent is this an exclusively American problem? How much of the health care “tech” opportunity is tied to managing the complicated multi-party bureaucracy of the U.S. system?

The article highlights how docs are spending too much time doing “desktop medicine” related to paperwork and billing. There’s a whole layer of adminstrative staff at every hospital doing this stuff too.

If we get Medicare For All someday, what will the impact be on the healthcare tech startup space?

For example I met someone at a bar the other day whose startup was all about managing medical bills. Consumers can scan their bills and they’ll look for optimizations and payment plans and budgeting or something. This would just go poof under M4A.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#196

Post by jlokier »

KineticLensman wrote: post #129
gaius wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of abuse seems hilarious. What abuse? That people might visit their local doctor more frequently? That's a good thing! In the UK A&E is flooded with people with minor ailments that could have been treated at home with a first aid kit, or people who are just drunk. The system is definitely taken for granted. People even call ambulances for a ride to an appointment, not even an emergency. Source: once spent…

Also UK. Some 'abuse' of A&E happens because people cannot alway get access to a local surgery as opposed to driving to a nearby hospital, especially at weekends.

I once did an experiment: I tried to get an appointment at a local clinic.

(Note: This anecdote was ~15 years ago. Things seem better now.)

Having failed to get an appointment the normal way, because they didn't have any slots available, I decided to test a theory.

I woke before 8pm and continuously dialled during the time slot from 8am-9am when it was, theoretically, possible to book an appointment. I'd wait for the busy tone, then immediately hang up and dial again. For an hour.

I did not get past the busy tone for the first 2 weeks.

After 9am I'd get through, and they told me there we no bookings available and I would need to call back the next day, and they recommended I call between 8am-9am...

In the end I got an appointment but it took 2 weeks and literally hundreds of call attempts to get one.

Apparently this was because the clinics keep statistics on how long people have to wait between making an appointment and attending.

To keep this number down, they set a limit on how far an advance it's possible to book an appointment.

Unfortunately, it had the side effect of preventing people from making appointments when all slots within the limit were filled.

The _true_ waiting time was therefore grossly hidden from reported statistics. And for many, it was enough to make them give up trying to get an appointment at all, further distorting the reported figures.

It took quite a long time before government, which had set the reporting requirements, learned how they were having the opposite of the intended effect.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#197

Post by gregjor »

justapassenger wrote: post #14
bobthepanda wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that the job of a product manager, though? To figure out what the product should actually do?

To be a true engineer, one should use technology to solve problems. PMs are suppose to help with that, but to be called an engineer, one should have that mindset. Otherwise, we're just code-monkeys.

Yes, but someone has to make sure engineers solve the right problem in a way useful to end users.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#198

Post by gregjor »

EpicEng wrote: post #48
hyperman1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do learn the business, you have to explain to management why you wasted all that time. You cant say your application is cheaper in user errors, downtime, maintenance, licences, change requests etc... as that would mean all the other expensive software is garbage.

I have yet to work for a company that doesn't value time spent learning the domain. I'm not impkying these places don't exist, but your comment enters the realm of trope (e.g. all managers are spiky haired, know nothing MBA's). If you work in a place like that, I'm sorry, that sucks.

A lot of startups work this way. A group of people with technical talent but little domain expertise. And they tend to see every problem as a technical problem.

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#199

Post by assblaster »

m0zg wrote: post #186
assblaster wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>> 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.

>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".

Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps

#200

Post by jboogie77 »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #2

Sounds like doctorsplaining. A better idea would be to hire nurses and technicians who spend thousands of hours in the trenches and let them tell you everything that really goes on.

The only nurses who spend more time behind the computer than doctors are those who are shopping. Unfortunately the doctor profession has turned from patient caregiver to note taker
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