Less research is needed
blogs.plos.org
Less research is needed
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Less research is needed
#2> Despite consistent and repeated evidence that electronic patient record systems can be expensive, resource-hungry, failure-prone and unfit for purpose, we need more studies to ‘prove’ what we know to be the case: that replacing paper with technology will inevitably save money, improve health outcomes, assure safety and empower staff and patients.
Paper-based systems are also failure-prone and unfit for purpose. They just fail in familiar ways that the old guard have accepted as just part of the business.
Re: Less research is needed
#3> On my first day in (laboratory) research, I was told that if there is a genuine and important phenomenon to be detected, it will become evident after taking no more than six readings from the instrument.
This is the reverse of a rule of thumb I find useful, that if you wish to measure something and get an approximate picture of your uncertainty, you should measure it 7-8 times.
The author's rule of thumb hinges delicately upon the definition of "readings", in particular upon the reach and precision of a given reading. I can look in the sky on dark nights and see Mercury, but even if I watch it through binoculars for years, I'll never resolve the "Genuine and Important" precession of its orbit [1], the first solid evidence for General Relativity.
Some important phenomena are subtle and rare. You can watch a liter of pure water for ~1500 years before you can expect a single neutrino from the Sun to interact and make a tiny flash of light [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Cla...
Re: Less research is needed
#4I really disliked that post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/11/links-for-july-2014/#co...
Re: Less research is needed
#5> Despite consistent and repeated evidence that electronic patient record systems can be expensive, resource-hungry, failure-prone and unfit for purpose, we need more studies to ‘prove’ what we know to be the case: that replacing paper with technology will inevitably save money, improve health outcomes, assure safety and empower staff and patients. Paper-based systems are also failure-prone and unfit for purpose. The…
Bad electronic record system is probably worst then paper based one. Good electronic record system might be better then paper based one. The trouble is that quality is not the thing that wins you big contract with big institution all too often, so I would not be surprised if the common electronic systems were the bad ones.
Re: Less research is needed
#6Maybe smarter research is needed? It seems to me that the problem is a similar one to what data science is trying to solve. How do we make sense of all this data?
Of course more research is still needed in many areas anyway.
Re: Less research is needed
#7> Despite consistent and repeated evidence that electronic patient record systems can be expensive, resource-hungry, failure-prone and unfit for purpose, we need more studies to ‘prove’ what we know to be the case: that replacing paper with technology will inevitably save money, improve health outcomes, assure safety and empower staff and patients. Paper-based systems are also failure-prone and unfit for purpose. The…
Bad electronic record system is probably worst then paper based one. Good electronic record system might be better then paper based one. The trouble is that quality is not the thing that wins you big contract with big institution all too often, so I would not be surprised if the common electronic systems were the bad ones.
Agreed, but we are also heavily biased towards this view as a community. I think we should try to steer the conversation away from this particular point.
But dear god... some people manage to make some awful software.
Re: Less research is needed
#8Last year a professor in my department (astronomy) suggested that he and I write a similar tongue-in-cheek paper to be published on April 1. The idea was to promote a moratorium on new astronomical data for one year. This would give observers time to reduce all the data they've already collected and theorists time to catch up to the observers.
It's facetious, of course, but there was a serious point behind it all. There is a certain tendency in science for a researcher to perform the same study over and over again just using larger or slightly modified data sets simply because that's what he knows how to do. Most of the time these sorts of Version 2.0 studies just reduce the error bars on the result without telling anyone anything new.
Now, of course, sometimes interesting results do come from such things. But much more often interesting results come from studies that attack a radically different problem or use a radically different approach. Science is a manpower-limited, not data-limited endeavor. Scientists have a finite amount of time that they can devote to research and they have to choose what projects to work on. There is still a great deal of low-hanging fruit---projects that require relatively small amounts of funding, relatively small amounts of manpower, and have the potential to yield genuinely new results. There are, for example, some really excellent projects that are being done with a telescope that basically consists of putting a commercial camera lens on a telescope mount [1]. But the difficulty of these sorts of projects is that they require creativity, and that is hard to come by. I'm not faulting anyone, though---I'm not an especially creative researcher myself!
Part of the problem is that grant agencies have a strong bias towards funding incremental science. While they say that they are in favor of funding breakthrough science rather than incremental science, the projects that actually get funded tell a different story. And it's hard to blame them because no one knows a good way to predict breakthrough results. It's an especially difficult problem to solve for theorists---in order to write a compelling theory proposal you basically have to have solved the problem already!
I've heard a number of solutions to these problems, but they're all as compelling to me as a year-long data moratorium (which, to be fair, would indeed force the community to become more creative). Hmm, maybe I'll actually write up that paper for April 1, 2015.
[1] http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml
Re: Less research is needed
#9Perhaps this is one of those white lies we tell to justify doing the right thing. A dishonest means to an honest end.
Is this maybe how researchers publish negative results without having to admit failure? We often complain about the dearth of published negative results. We talk about pre-registering studies and so forth.
It seems better to me for researchers to recast a negative result as an inconclusive positive result "requiring more study", than to not publish it at all. Just because there is a call for further research doesn't mean we have to do it.
Re: Less research is needed
#10> Despite consistent and repeated evidence that electronic patient record systems can be expensive, resource-hungry, failure-prone and unfit for purpose, we need more studies to ‘prove’ what we know to be the case: that replacing paper with technology will inevitably save money, improve health outcomes, assure safety and empower staff and patients. Paper-based systems are also failure-prone and unfit for purpose. The…
All systems fail at some point. Paper-based systems have the advantage of failing locally. Electronic systems have a horrible tendancy to fail globally.
As the saying goes, to err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.