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Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

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Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#61

Post by zo1 »

killjoywashere wrote: post #34
slaucon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey author here! Appreciate the feedback! Agreed on importance of portability and durability. I'm not trying to build this out or sell it as a tool to providers. Just wanted to demo what you could do with structured guidelines. I don't think there's any reason this would have to be unique to a practice or emr. As sister comments mentioned, I think the ideal case here would be if the guideline institutions released th…

The cancer reporting protocols from the College of American Pathologists are available in structured format (1). No major laboratory information system vendor properly implements them, properly, and their implementation errors cause some not-insignificant problems with patient care (oncologists calling the lab asking for clarification, etc). This has pushed labs to make policies disallowing the use of those modules a…

People could potentially properly implement them if they were open and available:

"Contact the CAP for more information about licensing and using the CAP electronic Cancer Protocols for cancer reporting at your institution."

This stinks of the same gate-keeping that places like NIST and ISO do, charging you for access to their "standards".

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#62

Post by grumbel »

Same reason why datasheets are still PDFs. It's a reliable, long lasting and portable format. And while it's kind of ridiculous that we are basically emulating paper, no other format fills that niche.

It's the niche HTML should be able to fill, since that was its original purpose, but isn't, since all focus over the last 20 or so years has been on everything else, but making HTML a better format for information exchange.

Trivial things like bundling up a complex HTML document into a single file don't have standard solutions. Cookies stop working when you are dealing with file:// URLs and a lot of other really basic stuff just doesn't work or doesn't exist. Instead you get offshot formats like ePUB that are mostly HTML, but not actually supported by most browser.

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#64

Post by mort96 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #59
PoignardAzur wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you're attributing malice, but it could just be that reliably implementing the formats is a really really hard problem?

How about fixing the format? Something that is obviously broken and resulting in patient deaths should really be considered a top priority. It's either malice or masskve incompetence. If these protocols were open there would definitely be volunteers willing to help fix it.

Incompetence at this level is intentional, it means someone doesn't think they'll see RoI from investing resources into improving it. Calling it malice is appropriate I feel.

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#65

Post by mort96 »

liontwist wrote: post #60
refurb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with oncologists and this isn’t true. Oncology has a rapidly changing treatment landscape and it’s common for oncologists to be discussing the latest paper that has come out. If you’re an oncologist and not keeping up with the literature you’re going to be out of date in your decisions in about 6 months from graduation.

Funny enough that last paragraph is also said of software engineers too. Neither are true.

Yeah, non-programmers seem to think everything is changing so quickly all the time yet here I am writing in a 40 year old language against UNIX APIs from the 70s ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#67

Post by troysk »

I find the web(HTML/CSS) the most open format for sharing. PDFs are hard to be consumed on smaller devices and much harder to be read by machines. I am working on a feature at Jaunt.com to convert PDFs to HTML. It shows up as reader mode icon. Please try it out and see if it is good enough. I personally think we need to do much better job. https://jaunt.com

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#68

Post by ErigmolCt »

troysk wrote: post #67

I find the web(HTML/CSS) the most open format for sharing. PDFs are hard to be consumed on smaller devices and much harder to be read by machines. I am working on a feature at Jaunt.com to convert PDFs to HTML. It shows up as reader mode icon. Please try it out and see if it is good enough. I personally think we need to do much better job. https://jaunt.com

PDFs can be notoriously difficult to work with on smaller devices

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#69

Post by JumpCrisscross »

maxerickson wrote: post #16
akoboldfrying wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is proposing that the DAG representation be in addition to the PDF: >The organizations drafting guidelines should release them in structured, machine-interpretable formats in addition to the downloadable PDFs. My opinion: Ideally the PDF could be generated from the underlying DAG -- that would give you confidence that everything in the PDF has been captured in the DAG.

You could generate the document from the graph and then attach it as data.

> could generate the document from the graph and then attach it as data

Much easier for doctors to draft PDFs than graphs.

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#70

Post by breytex »

Shouldn't the end goal be just to train an ai on all the pdfs and give the doctors an interface to plug in all the details and get a treatment plan generated by that ai?

Working on the data structure feels like an intermediate solution on the way to that ai which is not really necessary. Or am I missing something?

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