This article was extremely interesting. I remeber wired reporting on a system which would allow doctors to give a list of symptoms and have the most likely diagnostics listed by probability. Not sure of the name but technology like that has incredible potential. I also remember the article mentioning the reluctance of doctors to use it.
I keep reading comments like this and am wondering if anyone has been to an HMO in the past 5 years. This is part of any GP's office with a full EPIC install. I guess many probably don't use it, unless they are forced to. Just wanted to point out this tech already exists in a commercial product. It's not wonderful, it actually kind of sucks. I also wonder why hackers think software like this is going to have "incredible potential," or even be "good."
Why wouldn't it be "good"? If you can only remember the symptoms of 200 diseases, but the machine can remember 18000, why wouldn't it be net-beneficial to always input the symptoms into the machine, as well as performing whatever deductive diagnosis you do normally? Is it just because the UI of existing implementations is horrible?
I thinks this is the whole point, were not just talking about making a wiki of disease but doing some analysis of the case and narrowing down the range of disease possible to something the doctor can analyse.
To the ../../post can you remember the name of one of these systems? it be interesting to see what it does and how it works. I don't believe what's out there is what I'm imagining.
EDIT: reread your post, I just found the side for that EPIC system (terrible name). http://www.epic.com/ The page doesn't inspire confidence in this system being of any quality or does what I am talking about.
It does exactly what you're talking about. The quality is not good, but I don't know why anyone thinks the situation will improve. Countless careers have been wasted on expert systems, recommendation systems, and the like. The best minds doing this sort of thing will always be poached by wall street, where they still fail most of the time. However if it makes people feel better, most HMOs and managed care systems will start requiring their doctors to use such a system, if they don't already.
The problem is of expectations. We don't expect computers to write books (creativity is a Hard problem), but we do expect writers to use word processors.
Likewise, we shouldn't expect computers to deduce your ailment and prescribe treatment (critical thinking is also a Hard problem), but we should expect doctors to use computers to remember, search, and sort things for them: the things computers are good at.
We don't need the computer to think—we need it to help the doctor think. People should be working on that, not on systems to replace the doctors themselves.
I understand what you are saying but I'm an optimist at heart. I don't think careers were wasted because most of what's out there is not very good. This stuff is hard to solve but after seeing things like wolfram alpha I can't help but wonder if these systems will improve soon. As for startup attempting this, it's a long shot but those are the ones that make money.
I keep reading comments like this and am wondering if anyone has been to an HMO in the past 5 years. This is part of any GP's office with a full EPIC install. I guess many probably don't use it, unless they are forced to. Just wanted to point out this tech already exists in a commercial product. It's not wonderful, it actually kind of sucks. I also wonder why hackers think software like this is going to have "incredible potential," or even be "good."