• 2 Posts
  • 99 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • As long as the AI has access and can accurately interpret your medical history

    This is the crux of the issue imo. Interpreting real peoples’ medical situations is HARD. So the patient has a history of COPD in the chart. Who entered it? Did they have the right testing done to confirm it? Have they been taking their inhalers and prophylactic antibiotics? The patient says yes but their outpatient pharmacy fill history says otherwise (or even the opposite lol) Who do we believe, how do we find out what most likely happened? Also their home bipap machine is missing a part so better find somebody to fix that, or get a new machine.

    Everyone wants to believe that medicine is as simple as “patient has x y z symptom, so statistics say they’ve got x y z condition,” when in reality everything is intense shades of grey and difficult to parse, overlapping problems.



  • Not completely but I’m still worried. For example, a lot of inpatient places now have telemedicine capability, where a camera turns on in patient rooms and someone remotely can talk to people, observe what’s going on, put in orders, etc. Some places are using this to reduce the amount of actual on-site people, leading to worse nurse to patient ratios, or (imo) unsafe coverage models for patients who need hands-on care or monitoring. They added on a tele role like this onto my job description over a year ago, and I objected on moral grounds.

    If this tech gets off the ground, I can easily imagine the telemedicine human beings being replaced by AI.