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'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

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Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#121

Post by hotpotamus »

falcolas wrote: post #114
hotpotamus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually had anti-anxiety medications relieve a whole raft of symptoms that obviously turned out to be anxiety. There are many problems with healthcare systems, but I have to say that lorazepam is really the best drug I ever took; I can see why people become dependent, so I take it quite sparingly.

There's a lot that could be said about how an "anxiety" diagnosis is abused by doctors and insurance companies (especially against women), but in the end it really boils down to one thing: The medications you're taking should be a determination between you and your Doctor, and not an AI working for your insurance company.

I could probably expound quite a bit on the problems of interjecting an insurance company into healthcare, but I'd say that as a principal, I completely agree with you.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#122

Post by EdwardDiego »

cmiles74 wrote: post #68
asdajksah2123 wrote: post #23

I'm not sure I understand why AI is supposed to make anything better, at least under the regulatory regime we have right now. 1. AI doesn't do anything new. It's just human thinking done better in the best case scenario. So the plus side is that we may come up with ideas that a human might have come up with 10-15 years later. However, a lack of ideas is not the problem we face at all. We have solutions to nearly ever…

Right now, the only products I've seen leveraging LLMs are the tools from Nuance[1] that fill in physician notes. Arguably this is not an improvement; physician notes are already an incomprehensible garble of cut-and-paste content (often from other systems).[2] But at least it is unlikely to negatively impact patient care. So far, AFAICT, the drive is to cut costs by saving the time the physician spends with the EHR.…

My employer is exploring LLMs in our existing product for transcription purposes in a clinical setting, especially telehealth.

It's pretty damn impressive tbh.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#123

Post by [deleted] »

RecycledEle wrote: post #118
forgetfreeman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificial scarcity? Maybe. There aren't but so many households with children that fit inside the venn diagram of can afford med school, has the intellectual capacity and bloody-mindedness to actually finish med school, and is interested in going to med school.

> There aren't but so many households with children that fit inside the venn diagram of can afford med school, has the intellectual capacity and bloody-mindedness to actually finish med school, and is interested in going to med school. That is the artificial scarcity he was referring to. There is no reason to lump all medicine together in a MD degree /certification. Why not have one certification for each common prob…

[deleted]

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#125

Post by staunton »

LegibleCrimson wrote: post #69
staunton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather be treated in a modern hospital or one from 50 years ago? Would you choose the historical hospital if it charged you the same fraction of median income as it did back then?

It's not that black and white. There's more at play than just charges. Things can be better and still shockingly corrupt, with extreme amounts of unjustified overhead. Things are minimally better for any individual patient, while being extremely more expensive, and the insurance overhead has skyrocketed. The question is a little bit like responding to a complaint about industrialized agriculture's effects on the envi…

> It's not that black and white

The reason I wrote anything was that your original comment sounded very black and white to me.

I think we tend to overlook how much things improve in the long term. Knowing that they do hints at potential to do better still and should encourage us to take action and improve the situation.

Pointing out the current problems is necessary for that to happen. However, your comment came across as denying that healthcare can be improved, or at least that improvements can benefit patients. This is obviously false and I'm sure you didn't mean to claim it, so it's great we're able to add a bit more nuance.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#126

Post by cuteboy19 »

skohan wrote: post #87
forgetfreeman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A naïve readthrough would lead one to that conclusion perhaps but the elephant in the room here is capitalism. Pragmatically, any "good enough" solution will be used to replace skilled care to improve patient throughput and thus the bottom line.

The problem is that "skilled healthcare" is essentially a cartel which uses artificial scarcity to increase the price. You can see the counter-example in Cuba, which has an incredibly high number of MD's per capita compared to other countries, and achieves very good healthcare results, especially in the context of other metrics of development and economy. There are so pitifully few health care practitioners compared…

Cuba is hardly the example if their indentured servant doctors defect to Brazil.

Things must really really bad for someone to defect to Brazil

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#128

Post by skohan »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #126
skohan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "skilled healthcare" is essentially a cartel which uses artificial scarcity to increase the price. You can see the counter-example in Cuba, which has an incredibly high number of MD's per capita compared to other countries, and achieves very good healthcare results, especially in the context of other metrics of development and economy. There are so pitifully few health care practitioners compared…

Cuba is hardly the example if their indentured servant doctors defect to Brazil. Things must really really bad for someone to defect to Brazil

Exactly - it just shows how terrible the rest of the world is doing if Cuba of all places puts their medical system to shame, simply by training more doctors

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#129

Post by FireBeyond »

poidos wrote: post #20
apwell23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> screening will throw you out if you aren't 100% compatible with whatever they're looking for how does one know if this it the reason they are being thrown out.

You can never precisely be sure, but here are some of the behaviors I’ve been observing that give me the feeling I was auto-rejected: - rejection coming in nearly instantly - rejection coming at “odd” times — weekend evenings, 3 AM in my time zone for a company in my time zone The latter one doesn’t hold up too well for remote-first companies but I would hope few tech firms have recruiting staff going through applica…

Yup. I applied for a PM position, within 20 minutes of it going up. Quite a specific one: "'expert level' health insurance system knowledge and experience integrating between multiple EHR vendors and partners'". I have all of this. Have built claims benefits management systems being used by some household names in healthcare. I'm an expert in EPIC, Cerner, ESOsuite EHR systems.

10 minutes later: "we are looking for someone whose skillset and experience better aligns with our requirements and the position".

I guess my resume needed more buzzwords.

Re: 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

#130

Post by __loam »

mcosta wrote: post #76
manicennui wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is what Americans mean when they parrot bullshit about freedom: the freedom for corporations to do whatever they like in pursuit of profit.

Isn't the medical field one of the most regulated?

The answer is not less regulation, it's to have publicly owned healthcare. Those regulations were written in blood.

Also go listen to one of the latest episodes of Odd Lots where they interview Lena Khan about anti-trust. Private equity has been rolling up medical companies for decades, essentially doing things like buying up all the anesthesiology clinics in an area so they can jack up prices. Some of the bloat is due to regulations but a lot of the bloat is due to over-financialized bullshit like private equity buying up providers.

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