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

IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

statnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 711 posts

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#271

Post by Spooky23 »

FredPret wrote: post #110
oblio wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that you're from the US? Those are both people problems. Tech can't solve many people problems, especially something as entrenched as healthcare. Isn't it huge, something like 10% of the US economy?

I thought to myself: no way can this be true. The US generates $21tr a year[1]. How can medical be $2.1tr a year? …turns out, it’s $2.7tr!!! [2] [1]www.tradingeconomics.com [2] https://www.statista.com/study/15826/health-care-and-social-...

We have this health system to avoid taxes, but this crazy US system probably costs 97-98% of Americans pay more for health stuff than all of their actual taxes combined.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#272

Post by wussboy »

Bayart wrote: post #246
wussboy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 10 years at a small (<80 people) CX company that was full of intelligent, motivated employees. We were smart and quick and lean and did very good work. But we never dragged in big deals because no one at the company had that swagger/access to high-levels. The scenario you describe is dumb and ruinous and, unfortunately, true.

I think a lot of engineers shoot themselves in the foot looking down on social networking skill and the ability to speak corporate , as it were.

100% agree. I know many capable developers who will never do anything other than close tickets because they cannot build relationships. Some of them do not even understand why building a relationship might be fruitful.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#273

Post by jac241 »

RHSeeger wrote: post #64
tryptophan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's happening because hospital corporations love them. Corps can pay less, and since they have a tenth of the education, they order tons of profitable tests, consults, and scans because they don't know otherwise.

It's worth noting that the higher tiers of nurses have at least a masters degree, and like more time working than a doctor spends in residency. They are highly trained/skilled professionals.

I would guess that most people entering NP programs at this point have less than 3 years of work experience as a nurse, a job where you are not diagnosing, coming up with treatment plans, performing procedures or doing any other physician tasks.

I don't know if 500hrs of shadowing after a 2yr part-time online only program that you don't need any nursing degree or experience to enter would count as highly trained or skilled. Here's a list of direct entry nursing masters programs - https://nursinglicensemap.com/nursing-degrees/masters-in-nur...

Here's Johns Hopkins doctor of nursing practice program's curriculum - https://nursing.jhu.edu/academics/programs/doctoral/msn-dnp/... - where more than half of your classes are not medicine related and which requires an astounding 1000 clinical hours and less than 10 credits a semester before you can call yourself "doctor". Most medical students will have 1000hrs after 3 months in 3rd year, where they will be expected to diagnose and come up with treatment plans vs just shadowing, and they still have 9 more months of 3rd year, 4th year, and a minimum of 3 more years in residency. Doctors will likely end up with a minimum of 15000 hours of training. The difference really is that large, and I feel bad for the patients and for the NPs who have no idea how deficient their education is. PAs have 2000hrs of clinical experience. Here's a chart - https://i.imgur.com/Cj5z4f8.jpg

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#274

Post by austinjp »

listenallyall wrote: post #151
Brybry wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American medical system is truly bizarre. I've been to private practices where every day at lunch or near end of day there would be some drug rep with food for all the staff. And a psychiatrist that had stacks of free samples of drugs. Even contact lenses are marketed with free samples.

Everyone talks about the relationship between drug reps and doctors like it's the most incestuous, evil, corrupt thing. How else are doctors, especially those who are 10, 20 years removed from their residency, supposed to learn about new treatments and medicines? Alexa, what is best current treatment for a duodenal ulcer? You think a doctor is going to spend his limited downtime perusing the PDR (which no longer exis…

Part of the job, as stipulated by medical regulators around the world, is keeping up-to-date with evidence. This can be achieved by reading journals and attending conferences, in theory.

But.... journal publishers exploit their monopolies, and conferences are funded by corporate sponsors. So perhaps they're not so different.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#275

Post by InvertedRhodium »

nradclif wrote: post #197
cube00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But GPs often make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running. The private ones might the ones in the public system at least in my country need to see a patient every 10 minutes to keep their heads above water.

What country are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?

I'm in New Zealand and it's not too far from what was described.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#277

Post by dangrossman »

JediPig wrote: post #123
jiscariot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a role where half of our stuff is in IBM's cloud (for decisions made before my tenure). On a day in Mid-November, we started receiving alerts from our UAT and PROD environments. Logged in, all our stuff was gone. Opened a ticket and did some digging and found in our audit logs an IBM SRE had deleted all our stuff. They then told us there was no way to recover and we'd have to rebuild from scratch. They had…

so I worked at IBM cloud, and can confirm this. They bought a cloud service, that by itself, and if left alone would been great. Soft(....something...) was the company... then IBM came and changed everything. I remember the SVP / President of ibm cloud showing up... talking 3 hours about how her son is so great and that we should 'follow' his example... after hour 3, man goes and interrupts and asks a question that w…

I stopped using Softlayer after IBM took over. I still get emails about the daily "incidents" in "IBM Cloud", as well as monthly billing notices for my $0 bill. I don't know my "IBM Id" or "Softlayer Id" to log in any more as it's been almost a decade, so I can't unsubscribe from any of it.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#278

Post by aquaticsunset »

treis wrote: post #218
Aeolun wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I’m not sure IBM is a step up from the Indian firms. It’s certainly more expensive (like, ridiculously so) for not much more quality, if any.

IBM is basically an Indian firm these days

Rational comes to mind

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#280

Post by nradov »

goodells wrote: post #54
lotsofpulp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant It is happening. They are called physician assistants and nurse practitioners, "supervised" by a doctor. I assume going forward, they will take more and more of the usual pink eye/ear infection/flu and other common work that does not require 6 to 8 years of post bachelor education.

Yep. The midlevels are supported by automatic protocols in Epic (e.g. sepsis, DKA -> put these dozens of orders in with 5 clicks) that physicians decide on and approve. They also rely more heavily on imaging instead of a physical exam and history. When unsure, they can consult a physician, even a specialist. It’s a very polarizing topic in medicine that patients generally aren’t privy to. Especially for resident phys…

A two tiered system might actually be better for improving access to affordable health. Mid-level providers seem to achieve equivalent outcomes for routine cases at lower cost.

I agree that Congress should increase funding for residency programs.

https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/ama-seeks-mor...

Post reply on HN