Live data from Hacker News

Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

hopkinsmedicine.org

81–90 of 235 posts

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#81
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the market decide!11! Mark Cuban's project of selling off-brand medication for cheap is great - insurance companies don't want to work with them, but if said insurance companies still require their customers to pay for medication and that project is even cheaper than that, they'll get competed out of the market. Also that free market thing is a lie, it's in the medical industry's interest to keep prices high and…

> insurance companies don't want to work with them I'm not familiar with the peculiarities of the US healthcare system, but why wouldn't insurance companies work with off-brand medications? If it costs less it's good for them, no?

Exactly - in the Netherlands we have the reverse problem - if a generic drug exists, some insurance companies will only reimburse that drug. In some cases that leads to problems. One example was a generic drug where some patients were allergic to the excipients in the generic drug.

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#82
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure it is unintended...

This predicable outcome was either on purpose or the nation is ran by a cabal of people with severe cognitive impairment. What's better?

Porque no los dos?

(Why can’t it be both?)

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#85

And a sizeable portion of that medical error is due to poor device UX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I

This is insane. These device UIs should be standardized and any manufacturer making a significant UI change to their product should not be permitted to sell it under the same name and number. The FDA should be looking at this before approving such devices for use. Don't aircraft have more or less standardized controls and displays?

As far as I am aware, for every significant UI change we do at the medical device company I am working for, we bring a panel of final users (doctors and techs) to our facility and we have to do some validation tests, and finally show these validation results to the FDA before releasing the product.

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#88
post #51
post #26

apparently based on very flawed arguments https://gidmk.medium.com/medical-error-is-not-the-third-lead...

Not just flawed argument, but wildly inaccurate data that was then grossly misapplied. Unfortunately a lot of people on HN will just read the headline and think this is true, when it's very far from being the case. I wish we could link this whole thread to the refutation instead of further propagating this misinformation.

That’s why we can flag this. Which I did. Perfect use case for flagging. Just people reading the headlines propagates a damaging myth.

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#89
post #67

“Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,” That's because they're hard to standardize. What qualifies as a medical error? It's easy to go back after the fact and analyze a case where someone has a poor outcome and say 'we should have done this another way'. That doesn't mean there was any indicatio…

I'm a little skeptical that there are legitimately 250k that result in unnecessary death each year

From purely anecdotal experience, that number is totally believable. Again anecdotally, the medical field seems to only have two kinds of people, the extraordinarily competent and dedicated, and people who don't give a whiff of a shit. The medical bell curve looks more like a bathtub.

Re: Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)

#90
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is insane. These device UIs should be standardized and any manufacturer making a significant UI change to their product should not be permitted to sell it under the same name and number. The FDA should be looking at this before approving such devices for use. Don't aircraft have more or less standardized controls and displays?

As far as I am aware, for every significant UI change we do at the medical device company I am working for, we bring a panel of final users (doctors and techs) to our facility and we have to do some validation tests, and finally show these validation results to the FDA before releasing the product.

> we bring a panel of final users (doctors and techs) to our facility

Are they the same group of people each time?

Post reply on HN