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Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

bloomberg.com

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Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#211

Post by specialist »

somurzakov wrote: post #125
nradov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2007 an oral surgeon gave me a prescription for opioid painkillers after a wisdom tooth extraction, just in case I needed it for pain. The pain wasn't very bad and I never filled the prescription, but in retrospect giving me that prescription in the first place was just crazy! Another doctor gave my wife an opioid painkiller prescription upon hospital discharge after a normal childbirth, just in case she needed it…

this is to prevent you from going to the ER and getting an enormous bill. sometimes after tooth extraction a condition called "dry socket" can develop and it will cause enormous pain. opioids solve that until your next regular visit to a doctor. otherwise you could feel terrible pain and go to ER in the night with all the consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_osteitis

One should always have scripts both for pain killers and anti-nausea meds at the ready after major procedures.

And avoid scheduling anything right before your surgeon takes time off (weekends, vacation).

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#212

Post by bcrosby95 »

penagwin wrote: post #144
JshWright wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The age old adage... If you're not paying for the product, you are the product...

I'd think Americans are paying enough for their Healthcare to not be the product but....

For the first time, this year my tax document shows how much my employer is paying for my health insurance.

34k/year. Yeah, that's a lot.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#213

Post by the_decider »

logfromblammo wrote: post #98

They put pop-up stealth advertisements, targeted at your doctor, into your electronic medical record, so that he or she would get you addicted to painkillers. Software developers did this. For drug money. That's just terrible, isn't it? They shouldn't have done that. But even if the developers had ethical concerns, they had no recourse but to quit, and be replaced by someone else--who might get six months of work in…

Those engineers that drafted gas-chamber blueprints had kids to feed too. You’re no better than they are.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#214

Post by Barrin92 »

ska wrote: post #121
mtgx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are going to go to prison for this, right? Or has all white crime been made legal in America? Because I can't tell anymore.

Or has all white crime been made legal in America? Can you think of a time when it was significantly more likely for something like this to end up with execs in jail?

it's been a few thousand years, but maybe the Code of Hammurabi might be of assistance

If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#215

Post by Barrin92 »

Enough people have pointed to the problems of for-profit healthcare and drug markets in the comments but I'd also want to stress that this is also an issue of privacy. These patient informations should never have made it through so many hands and there should be no pop-up ads in a doctors record file.

Before anyone complains about burdensome regulations, these are the situations were respecting people's information prevents deaths an family tragedy.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#216

Post by pixl97 »

kbenson wrote: post #175
krageon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that nobody involved in any side of that argument (the people writing the justification and the people reading it) actually believe it is true. It's just some noise some person came up with to argue in bad faith why they should be allowed to keep doing bad things if it is good for their wallet.

Never underestimate what someone will believe when they have a vested interest in believing it.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#217

Post by h2odragon »

bpaddock wrote: post #35
marriedWpt wrote: post #12

Remember when physicians said they should be the only ones to give out antibiotics for our safety? Can we totally kill that excuse for their monopoly? We trusted the physician cartel for decades and they have made healthcare worse.

Fluoroquinolone antibiotics such as Levaquin (no longer manufactured, only generics now [you can not sue the makers of generics in most states]), Cipro etc. should be removed from the market due to their devastating side effects. My late wife's Journal was part of the 2015 FDA hearing about getting these restricted from doctors giving them out like candy. Alas all we got was yet more "Black Box" warnings that you and…

Cipro was a weird one; it was "omg last resort top of the line" there for a bit; then Amerithrax happened and the shit was being handed out like candy; and a few years later my dog gets it post-op "for the rest of her life".

I doubt the story of how that happened, the corruption and stupidity that enabled it, will ever make it out of the land of "conspiracy theorist ravings" ... but it should.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#218

Post by braindeath »

conanbatt wrote: post #44
to11mtm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I've never heard a good thing about Epic...

It's made in Visual Basic, and it literally cannot interact with its own versions. Hospitals have different versions of the same system in the same building and cant exchange information. All EMR's suck though. (note: I made one)

The front-end is in Visual Basic.

The backend is most certainly not in anything close to Visual Basic.. (MUMPS - using Intersystems Cache as the object store implementation)

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#219

Post by nradov »

conanbatt wrote: post #191
nradov wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small independent practices are a dying market anyway. Provider organizations are all consolidating in order to achieve economies of scale (especially for EHRs), provide comprehensive services to patients under one roof, and achieve greater pricing power when negotiating with payers. Plus most physicians prefer being employees; they just want to practice medicine without the additional administrative hassle of runnin…

Its true that running independently is getting more difficult, but that's not "on the market" but on the insidious regulations around insurance, malpractice law, etc. A doctor can't open up an office and tend to patients with pen and paper anymore, and they have to pay thousands of dollars a month to systems that are truly terrible to be compliant.

Medicine is also a team sport now. Caring for patients with complex conditions requires coordination with multiple other practitioners. Exchanging paper records with them just isn't practical or safe. Plus if the doctor has to write a prescription, doing it on paper is so error prone as to border on malpractice.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#220

Post by batiudrami »

dfsegoat wrote: post #183
alexandercrohde wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think punishing the engineer would be much less practical than the CEO. There will always be an engineer (perhaps a remote contractor) who will build this.

> I think punishing the engineer would be much less practical than the CEO. Of course. I wouldn't really ever consider engineers to be to blame - they could whistleblow of course, but the people that inked the deal and brought it to the engineers should be held responsible. If we can't hold the tech industry responsible for this, what hope do we have holding them responsible for murkier issues like privacy/data colle…

A fundamental part of engineering accreditation in most countries is ethics and enforcing the fact that you are to blame for the things you build and you are obligated to raise objection.
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