Rebooting Your Doctor

Tech Central Station ^ | 07-12-06 | glenn harlan reynolds

[em2vn]

Andy Kessler has worked in Silicon Valley for a long time. He's seen the way that improving technology can lower costs and increase capabilities in all sorts of areas, and now he says that it's time for silicon to do for medicine what it's done for so many other fields.

[em2vn]

It's well past time to drag hospitals into the IT age.

[SuzyQue]

I have a number of friends/family in medicine. It is amazing how unwilling many of them are to use computers in their jobs. They do act like there are "Geeks at the Gate".

Their fear, and it may be a reasonable one, is that by doing so they remove much of a necessary human component from the medicine-patient interaction.

[MarkL]

At a number of hospitals in KC, they've gone completely (encrypted) wireless. Rather than standard charts, every patient room has a wireless tablet computer. All patient info is entered into the system through the tablet, or through telemetry from test devices. Anyone with clearance, can pull up patient info from any computer in the hospital, and through VPNs, they can link up to the hospital's system from home, if need be.

Mark

[martin_fierro]

"Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning."

[ReformedBeckite]

Well what if the computers crash, hang up, or reboot, or get corrupted,

What will they say then: "He crashed when our system crashed."

[annie laurie]

Ping

[neverdem]

bfl

[Gamecock]

I can't get over the difficulty I have in using technology in my practice. My Palm has all the lates journals, drug updates, etc. The Army won't even let me sync my Palm to my computer.



Our Electronic Medical Record, named AHLTA (Ah hell, lets try again) moves with all the speed of a 386 with 4 megs of RAM.

[Polybius]

Right now, technology isn't doing much. Kessler spent time with a radiologist reading mammograms, and discovered that it's done the same way it was done in the 1950s -- with a light box and a dictation setup. But there's one improvement. Where once two radiologists read each mammogram, now only one does, with the human opinion being compared to that of an expert system.

"Expert" my @ss.

I use one of those C.A.D. systems in my mammogram readings (the leading name brand device) and the computer algorithm is as dumb as a box of rocks.

It flags just about every benign calcification in atherosclerotic arteries and other obviously benign calcifications in the breast and it often misses suspicious masses and subtle micro-calcifications.

If I relied solely on this so-called "expert" system, most of my mammogram patients would be getting two or three biosies on each breast after every mammogram.

One of these days, a computer may be able to match an "expert" human brain in radiology but that day is certainly not today.

[WaterDragon]

I agree with you polybius. There is already a huge problem of potential human error in patient files -- incorrect and/or incomplete info entered by a nurse or doctor, for example. And very often doctors don't even read the files when he has only five minutes to see a patient. Computerizing addresses none of these problems.

Frankly, getting medical assistance is risky. I come from an extended family of doctors of every sort and a lot of RNs as well as small-town hospital owners, so I'm not down on the medical profession per se. But the way things are set up nowadays for doctors and patients is scary.