Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I quit medicine

gautams.posterous.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Why I quit medicine

#41

Post by devs1010 »

dalore wrote: post #37
devs1010 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and hospitals have arcane policies / IT departments, my dad is a doctor and the hospital he works at still has Internet Explorer 6 installed on all computers there and they refuse to upgrade it for fear it might break compatibility with some ancient software program they use they access through it. He wants me to create some little software program to see if he can get them to use it when the main system goes do…

Why can't you code it for chrome and have the computer have multiple browsers on it?

its forbidden by their IT department, I don't know the whole picture, as I'm just going by what information my dad was able to pry out of them, but I think they basically have barebones machines with nothing but essential software and something such as a browser other than IE 6 isn't on that list and I guess you would have to move mountains to get them to approve it because apparently they haven't moved into this century with everyone else and are stuck in the past.

Re: Why I quit medicine

#42

Post by mmonihan »

A strategy that may have a chance, given the current situation:

1. Befriend and work with a mentor who happens to be high up in the IT department in a health system.

2. Create some kick-ass app

3. Open-source it(use the open-source version as a way for IT people in other health systems to use your work)

4. Have your mentor implement that software in their health system as a pilot project.

5. Befriend other IT directors and try to sell to them.

6. Befriend other medical software providers and try to license to them.

7. Make hay while the sun shines.

Re: Why I quit medicine

#43

Post by devs1010 »

mhurron wrote: post #40
devs1010 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and hospitals have arcane policies / IT departments, my dad is a doctor and the hospital he works at still has Internet Explorer 6 installed on all computers there and they refuse to upgrade it for fear it might break compatibility with some ancient software program they use they access through it. He wants me to create some little software program to see if he can get them to use it when the main system goes do…

>they refuse to upgrade it for fear it might break compatibility with some ancient software It will break, in horrible and unknown ways, and even if it didn't if the company supporting it got wind that you used a different version of IE, or heaven forbid Firefox, that's probably enough to deny support. It's probably not even ancient software, they might have purchased it in the last couple of years. Medical software…

I think it may even go beyond that, where they have even stipulated what other software could be run on the machine. I do know, for example, that they HAVE to run XP, nothing newer, or it would void their support, etc.. its really insane how companies can get away with that, I don't even understand how for a web app (it uses a Java applet, so I guess it goes beyond a regular "web app", but still..) they can demand this sort of control over the end user's system.

Re: Why I quit medicine

#44

Post by rmk2 »

kyro wrote: post #13

Good on you, man. I'm in medical school currently and the emphasis on locking down patient data is one of the most frustrating things to see. I'm convinced that it's a policy that everyone knows has little benefit and yet pushes for ethical brownie points. What's to be gained from freeing up the data far, far exceeds what could potentially be lost. Even freeing up anonymized patient data seems to be met with oppositi…

>> I'm in medical school currently and the emphasis on locking down patient data is one of the most frustrating things to see.

Is this meant hyperbolic? Confidentiality is probably one of the most important parts of a doctor-patient-relationship. Even "statistical" information about people's health/illnesses should in my opinion only be used after prior written consent.

The potential amount of damage to reputation, social life or life (depending on circumstances) of leaked/stolen medical records/patient data redeem every effort to keep them as closely guarded as possible, in my opinion.

Re: Why I quit medicine

#45

Post by Symmetry »

jerf wrote: post #16
kyro wrote: post #13

Good on you, man. I'm in medical school currently and the emphasis on locking down patient data is one of the most frustrating things to see. I'm convinced that it's a policy that everyone knows has little benefit and yet pushes for ethical brownie points. What's to be gained from freeing up the data far, far exceeds what could potentially be lost. Even freeing up anonymized patient data seems to be met with oppositi…

"Even freeing up anonymized patient data seems to be met with opposition." Unfortunately, statistically, "anonymous patient data" is an oxymoron. Any useful amount of patient data contain enough information to deanonymize it to a great extent, and in conjunction with other data often fully deanonymize. http://33bits.org/2010/06/21/myths-and-fallacies-of-personal...

Quite true, but that does take effort. Whatever we do we're going to have to make a tradeoff between saving lives and preserving privacy at some point.

Re: Why I quit medicine

#47

Post by devs1010 »

tejaswiy wrote: post #36

You're getting it wrong I think. I work in healthcare IT and many EMRs are getting on the mobile bandwagon and building out mobile clients that let you do this. Additionally, hospitals require doctors to put in diagnosis / treatment notes into EMRs which is usually done by transcribing service that the doctors can call or by sitting at a computer and typing it out. Although this process is worse than doing it over a…

My understanding is that some "hospital chains" have started doing stuff like this, primarily larger ones, however I think a lot of the smaller / independent ones are often still stuck in the dark ages as they can't afford the hassle of moving to newer technology

Re: Why I quit medicine

#48

Post by kami8845 »

arn wrote: post #6

I quit medicine too, but not because of the lack of adequate computer interface :) The whole taking notes, jotting down patient information. It seems antiquated, but it's really a hard problem to "fix" - if it really needs fixing. These are not medical records he's talking about, but personal notes on each patient and todos you carry around with you during your shift. Paper/pen in taking these notes is faster than co…

>I quit medicine too, but not because of the lack of adequate computer interface :)

If you don't mind my asking, why did you quit?

Re: Why I quit medicine

#49

Post by jeybalachandran »

Thanks for writing this article and good luck with your venture. I'm not a doctor but my company works in healthcare and deals with the same physician related problems. So believe me when I say, I understand your pain.

Passing along patient information is a tricky subject due to HIPAA-compliancy. Most patient information is transmitted via fax machines and doctors are alerted of incidents through pagers, often carrying multiple. This technology is archaic and considering 75% of US physicians own some sort of Apple product there has to be change. In particular, physicians need better forms of communication that saves them time.

I'm hoping this changes as it will impact us all. It isn't going to happen overnight but with more and more physicians pushing for change in this area, one can only hope it happens sooner. If you're interested in what my company does, check out our website at https://www.doximity.com and our blog http://blog.doximity.com/ talks about similar problems.

Re: Why I quit medicine

#50

Post by vannevar »

mgkimsal wrote: post #3

Paper isn't secure, but probably more 'secure' than data on a phone, cause there's far less risk of the paper getting duplicated silently than data being pulled from a smartphone (silent sending of address/contacts, etc). Seriously? A shared Word document? With no audit trail of who wrote what? And that is an improvement over the state of the art? It sounds like Wordpress has far more robust data management (and prob…

Paper isn't secure, but probably more 'secure' than data on a phone...

Good point. I'd also add that it's difficult to automate the process of scanning millions of hospitals for crumpled pieces of paper, whereas scanning blocks of millions of IP addresses for vulnerable smartphones is something any reasonably competent script-kiddie can do.

Post reply on HN