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Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

bloomberg.com

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Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#11

Post by pintxo »

codeulike wrote: post #5

[when opening a patients records] a pop-up would appear, asking about a patient’s level of pain. Then, a drop-down menu would list treatments ranging from a referral to a pain specialist to a prescription for an opioid painkiller. Click a button, and the program would create a treatment plan. From 2016 to spring 2019, the alert went off about 230 million times. The tool existed thanks to a secret deal. Its maker, a s…

One doctors quote in the article says it all:

> But, “if you want to model electronic health records as a for-profit system and not regulate them as such and force doctors to be on them, it’s almost inevitable that they’re going to be manipulated.”

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#13

Post by jacobush »

marriedWpt wrote: post #12

Remember when physicians said they should be the only ones to give out antibiotics for our safety? Can we totally kill that excuse for their monopoly? We trusted the physician cartel for decades and they have made healthcare worse.

Yeah... how about regulate them and then enforce it. Antibiotics should never be off the counter.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#14

Post by idiot900 »

pimmen wrote: post #4

I think this creates an interesting discussion on the part of the designers and programmers. Did they understand that what they were building was going to increase opioid dependence? Did they ask about it? And, the most interesting question of all: If they found out that was the case did they try to justify building it to themselves in some way? Full disclaimer: I have built software that I had ethical reservations a…

I'm a doctor. During medical school and residency, I was taught in good faith that "only as much as necessary" opioid was OK to give and wouldn't create dependence - it was only an "excess" of opioid that would cause a problem. So under the banner of reducing the suffering of our patients, and a mandate to reduce patient-reported pain scores, opioids flowed relatively freely.

Now we know that was a terrible idea with devastating consequences. But we didn't know better and truly thought we were doing right by our patients. It's hard to imagine a programmer without medical training could be blamed.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#16

Post by sambull »

jacobush wrote: post #13
marriedWpt wrote: post #12

Remember when physicians said they should be the only ones to give out antibiotics for our safety? Can we totally kill that excuse for their monopoly? We trusted the physician cartel for decades and they have made healthcare worse.

Yeah... how about regulate them and then enforce it. Antibiotics should never be off the counter.

How do you feel about the uses of antibiotics in the food chain? The US of which is #1 winning in that.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#17

Post by swiley »

r_singh wrote: post #9

In retrospect doesn't seem like a very big surprise that they would resort to something like this as Practice Fusion was initially launched as free for a long time, and costed only $99 per month later. One should be increasingly wary of using free software for crucial applications and sensitive data. Being HIPAA compliant isn't enough. There's a regulatory body called POC3 ( https://www.poc3.org ) for communication d…

I think you mean free as in free beer and software as in software services.

IMO the medical industry could use more free as in freedom software, and that may be an alternative way to prevent things like this.

Re: Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

#19

Post by loceng »

chadmeister wrote: post #15

This is one of the most comically evil things I've ever heard of. I bet you the person who designed this feature is on hacker news as we speak. If you are and you see this I hope you get run over by a bus today.

I'd rather take a positive approach - and wish that the person would not be a coward and raise alarm bells, or that we had whistle blower laws and a substantial reward in place so whistle blowing was also incentivized.
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