I heard a quote that ‘400,000 people die in America because of preventable medical error’.
(The quote wasn’t attributed to anyone, so I don’t know how realistic it is. But let’s say its true).
With a US population of 318m and life expectancy of 79 years (thankyou Wikipedia) about 4m people die in America every year. So if that quote is right, 1 in 10 die because of ‘preventable medical error’. Perhaps that should be more accurately put ‘die earlier than they otherwise might’.
There’s a lot of talk about using computers and analytics in health – but perhaps it is also worth asking the question of whether we should be giving doctors better tools to make decisions with.
I know enough about health to know that it is very complicated and there are many reasons why bodies end up as they are, and most things have human causes. It might be true that ‘we are what we eat’ but we eat what we eat for other reasons which all goes into it.
This is the kind of abstract pattern spotting intelligence that humans can do much better than computers.
A computer can support an expert by providing statistical analysis, searching through academic papers, making word associations, finding some obscure paper with a special mixture of search terms in it. It can make lots of incorrect associations that lead to the wrong diagnosis. Computers are good search tools.
Is anyone thinking about how the power of computers can better be used to support experts -or does everyone in IT assume that the human brain will be eclipsed by computing power very shortly and so it isn’t worth the effort?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.