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Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
131–140 of 163 posts
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medical information system vendors only care about making a profit, not implementing actual solutions. The discrepancies between systems can lead to bad information which can cost people their life.
As an analogy, imagine if the consequence of Oracle doing Oracle-as-usual things was worse medical outcomes. But they did them anyway for profit. That's basically medical information system vendors. The fact that the US hasn't pushed open source EMRs through CMS is insane. It's literally the perfect problem for an open solution.
I love open source EMRs, but has any major country adopted open source EMRs?
I know OpenMRS exists but is mainly used within developing nations.
The US has Vista, made by VA, and it is a beast and no one really wants to use it.
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#133Why isn't all human knowledge in one big JSON file? Guidelines are decision trees, but they're not written to be applied by rote, because the identical patients with identical cancers posited in the hypothetical don't exist . The guidelines are not written for maverick clinician movie protagonists to navigate the decision tree in real time while racing against an oncological clock, they're for teams of clinicians who…
Because JSON is fucking horrible for humans? If there's anything I want to read it's searchable paper.
>Because JSON is fucking horrible for humans?
It's better than XML at least.
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medical information system vendors only care about making a profit, not implementing actual solutions. The discrepancies between systems can lead to bad information which can cost people their life.
As an analogy, imagine if the consequence of Oracle doing Oracle-as-usual things was worse medical outcomes. But they did them anyway for profit. That's basically medical information system vendors. The fact that the US hasn't pushed open source EMRs through CMS is insane. It's literally the perfect problem for an open solution.
It wouldn't be appropriate for the federal government to push any particular product. They have certified open source EHRs. It's not at all clear that increased adoption of those would improve patient outcomes.
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an analogy, imagine if the consequence of Oracle doing Oracle-as-usual things was worse medical outcomes. But they did them anyway for profit. That's basically medical information system vendors. The fact that the US hasn't pushed open source EMRs through CMS is insane. It's literally the perfect problem for an open solution.
It's worse than that. VistA is a world-class open source EMR that the VA has been trying to kill for decades.
VistA was useful in it's time but it's hardly world class anymore. There were fundamental problems with the platform stack and data model which made it effectively impossible to keep moving forward.
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#136Earlier 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.
You're making a lot of unsupported assumptions. There's no reliable evidence that this is causing patient deaths, or that a different format would reduce the death rate.
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#137I 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
Oncologists making treatment decisions are generally using real computers, not toy mobile devices.
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#138Shouldn'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?
What you're missing is there is no evidence that using AI models results in better patient outcomes than simpler clinical decision support tools.
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#139super cool post until i saw you used an llm to do this
Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because JSON is fucking horrible for humans? If there's anything I want to read it's searchable paper.
>Because JSON is fucking horrible for humans? It's better than XML at least.
JSON has never been better than XML. People are just terrible at XML and don't want to learn.