Click bait title. Actual title should be: "Doctors are asking Silicon Valley engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building MEDICAL apps"
Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
91–100 of 216 posts
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think eventually we'll have to sidestep most of this fraud entirely by enabling self-serve early diagnostics and cranking up the doctor-replacing technologies to the max. Machines are good at recognizing patterns in non-adversarial environments not starved for compute. There's every possibility that they could do diagnostics better than a human could. Treatment will be up to human doctors for the foreseeable future…
>But it's still happening, starting with EKG and ultrasound. Whole-body ultrasound? How would an AI understand how to interpret images with low signal:noise? Who will be performing the actual ultrasound image capture? Who will be ordering the imaging tests? How will an AI understand a patient that can't meaningfully interact with an AI? What's the utility of "EKG" [sic] for diagnosing non-cardiac problems? Or, do you…
Sure, I realize there's much that the current tech does not cover. But you gotta start somewhere, and through extremely wide deployment tens of thousands of lives will be saved, and important feedback will be collected to improve products. $400 watch that does a dozen other things and that the user would buy even if it didn't have ECG is not "expensive diagnostics".
This is where things are at, whether you like it or not, especially for the working poor who can't afford to fork over a few hundred dollars every time something feels "off". The current crop of devices is not affordable to them, but 5-10 years from now they'll be bundled in cereal boxes. Hook up sensors to wearables, catch diseases early and at a massive scale, cure or treat them before they get extremely expensive. To me it looks like it's the only way out of the ripoff "healthcare" scheme we're in right now. I'm pretty convinced the solution to the US healthcare problem will be technological in nature.
And don't tell me universal healthcare will fix things. It won't, because US doctors (unlike their counterparts elsewhere) expect to be earning a pretty penny after they go through the trouble (and expense) of educating themselves for a decade, and that's not going to change. There simply needs to be less demand for doctors, and the ones that remain should be able to use their time efficiently.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure I'm being naieve, but could we just get rid of billing altogether if we nationalize the health care system? I have to recount an anecdote. My mom was hiking in a foreign country, and got injured. She hobbled to the next town, and found a clinic. They treated her and were ready to let her go. She said: Q: Okay, how do I pay? A: You don't pay for health care. Q: I'm American. I'm not part of your health care s…
Somebody will be paying, and will want adequate and auditable documentation about what they are paying for. The potential for fraud is too great. Medicare and states all have to watch for fraud in their claim payments.
Sure, but adequate and auditable documentation need not involve the patient nor money. Just a "here is the medical care we dispersed, on this date, to this person, it took these resources, these people administered the care." No following up every record for payments, no arguing with insurance companies over the price.
And also, what abuse? If medical care is free and drugs are cheap, the only real abuse is drug abuse (by either seekers or medical personnel). With free access to proper care those drug abuse problems will sharply decrease, killing the market (the cause of the other half of drug abuse).
The only reason there is medicare fraud to worry about right now is because not everyone is supposed to be on it, the "fraud" is attempting to get free health care. Which wouldn't exist if everyone had it.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#94My neighbor’s son is a doctor who needed some software written. He learned to write the software and now runs a software business (in addition to being a doctor). I guess it was easier than trying to bring developers in. Ive seen the same thing with a pilot who learned programming to write an incident management system for airlines. Only once the software was successful did he seek advice from ‘professionals’. Learni…
Scott Adams calls this the "talent stack". https://blog.dilbert.com/2016/11/28/the-trump-talent-stack/
Basically: individually these skills might not produce truly impressive results. Combined they produce great value.
I have yet to figure out what my second "talent" in my talent stack could be. When I do figure it out I have a feeling things come much quicker.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#95My neighbor’s son is a doctor who needed some software written. He learned to write the software and now runs a software business (in addition to being a doctor). I guess it was easier than trying to bring developers in. Ive seen the same thing with a pilot who learned programming to write an incident management system for airlines. Only once the software was successful did he seek advice from ‘professionals’. Learni…
Coding isn’t hard. Writing maintainable code is. And most people learn that only after they have to modify a large system they wrote themselves.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have UX designers. The problem is those designers don't necessarily understand clinical workflows. That takes years of experience.
Jakob Nielsen was writing for decades now that the first job of an interface designer is to sit down with future users and see how they do their work. (Always users , more than one.) It doesn't take years of experience in the target field. It just takes hours of watching and listening and figuring out what people are actually trying to do.
I am familiar with Jakob Nielsen's writings, and I stand by my statement. Effective UX design in the medical field takes years of experience. It's far more complex than most other business domains because every medical specialty has different requirements and there are so many edge cases. No one is capable of learning that stuff in a few hours.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somebody will be paying, and will want adequate and auditable documentation about what they are paying for. The potential for fraud is too great. Medicare and states all have to watch for fraud in their claim payments.
Sure, but adequate and auditable documentation need not involve the patient nor money. Just a "here is the medical care we dispersed, on this date, to this person, it took these resources, these people administered the care." No following up every record for payments, no arguing with insurance companies over the price. And also, what abuse? If medical care is free and drugs are cheap, the only real abuse is drug abus…
> And also, what abuse?
a clinic could mis-report (over-report?) how many patients they treated, and/or the procedure. They can then claim back more money than they actually spent, netting easy profit.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#98If any doctors want to discuss app development, I’m very open
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#99IBM's Watson has killed trust in medical software for a generation.
Re: Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
#100I have often wondered if it would be better to just hire professional data entry people to follow the doctor around and enter all the information into the system. Does it really make sense paying someone $500K a year to peck and tap into a EHR?
> I have often wondered if it would be better to just hire professional data entry people to follow the doctor around and enter all the information into the system. Those data people are called "medical scribes," my doctor has started using one. Seems like they're mostly pre-med college students looking to get exposure to healthcare environments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_scribe
They even have eScribes from foreign countries through video chat. One of my doctors has one from the Phillipines which was familiar with his very uncommon EMR. The scribe company gave him an iPad to video chat.