Posted by Bill Sandweg on 01 January 2018.
Last month I wrote about what many health care professionals believe to be the biggest problem in medicine: lack of patient compliance. This has been offered as the reason the many new technical advances in medicine are failing to produce the improved outcomes they promised.
Other health care professionals have pushed back on this argument. Their view is that technical advances are not living up to the hype because they are delivering more information than doctors can use and delivering it in a way that is not helpful. These critics see the problem as a medical information version of trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose. Doctors are flooded with too much information. They do not have the time to sift through it to detect patterns.
The problem with these advances, write the critics, is that they were created to meet the needs of the software developers instead of the needs of the medical profession. What doctors need, they argue, is a specific alert when something is going wrong with a patient. These critics correctly point out that we have the computing power today to create algorithms that can spot developing trouble and warn the treating doctor before the problem gets out of hand. Instead of routinely directing the patient to return in two weeks so the doctor can see and evaluate the patient again, the doctor can wait for an alert from the monitoring equipment and only see the patient when there has been a change in the patient’s condition.
So, if developers have the ability to give the medical profession what it wants, what is the hold up? As with self-driving cars, they are worried about being sued when the inevitable accident occurs. Just as today’s physical medicine is not perfect and 100% accurate, algorithms are not perfect and are going to miss some problems. It is the fear of medical malpractice suits that is holding back developers, claim the critics. If this is true, we need a solution just as we need one for self-driving cars. I don’t know what that solution might look like but the opportunity to greatly advance medicine demands one. Any proposed solution should address the failings of the current medical malpractice suit model, which greatly favors health care providers over injured patients and allows only the most seriously injured patients to participate. There has got to be a better way to identify and compensate those injured by medical negligence and this is a wonderful opportunity to explore those possible alternatives.
