What would revolutionize healthcare

itsautonomic

Any Ideas?  Here are two that I think about.

I love the portals, but with complicated diagnosis's often a person goes to many doctors until its finally diagnosed. But unless an original doctor or others in the chain refered that patient , or the patient goes back to each doctor along the way and educates them on diagnosis how will they ever learn?  It seems very inefficient to me and another person with exactly the same thing would get missed by same doctor who missed the original case.

If there was a way to link portals to all doctors portals and it could send update once diagnosis is made to doctors email or portal then the communication chain would exist and allow learning to take place.  The doctor could see where they went wrong and what they might add to their own diagnostic skills.  I truly think about 30% would give a care and read up and learn.

Another one I thought of and I shy away from this one due to dislike of technology vs. real evaluation. But since real evaluations are going away and I truly have lost faith in the diagnostic skills of most low to mid level doctors I would think some brain trust like google, IBM, or some startup could actually design a computer to narrow down a person's diagnosis based only upon their symptoms and with each test narrow it down.  With what is going on in technology and most industries adopting to avoid human error there has to be consideration that it could actually do some of it better than a doctor.

dilauro

A while back ago I mentioned about patient/doctor portals and how effective they have become in getting information out to everyone.

But , I also stated that the biggest challenge will be to get Electronic Medical Records available to all those that have a need for it.  Compatibility problems  and the fact that so far (USA only) they have not come up with a unique identification for everyone.  I always thought things like social security number, driver lic #, etc were unique, but there was enough testing to proved that wasnt the answer.

Working for IBM for 35 years, I did have the opportunity to work on a project that was interfacing main frame computers with hospital information..   That was around 1991/2.   Never really made it and I believe it was because they had programmers write all the code and not get the medical understanding from the appropriate people.

Today, I knew a few situations where the "Watson" concept is being explored.    I was told by a few doctors that said that they see it working for simple procedures, but not complicated ones.   The obstacle was the learning , intuition , creativity that some doctors need to diagnose a problem.   Some day hopefully this will all happen.

Kimmy72

"Linkage blindness"-- a term more typically associated with forensic/criminal psychology, but definitely applies to the medical field, too.  At face value (and it's unfortunate that this has so much power), it could look like a person was visiting a variety of doctors to get prescription medications.  A closer look, however, would reveal that these doctors were of different specialties, and rather than seeking drugs, the person was trying to find out the cause of their continued health issues.  Makes me wonder how many people have been "redflagged" for doing nothing more than having a desire to feel better!!! 

itsautonomic

I was hoping you would chime in because I do not know much about this stuff.  It just seems that if a doctor can access any patients medication records it would be pretty easy  ( in terms of tech genius companies )to link med records and updates.  Guess its much more than that. 

I was thinking the Watson concept might be valuable because of the internet diagnosis.  Speaking for myself, while it can be a bed of quicksand looking at symptoms and such while online,  out of necessity I was able to use it with symptoms to kind of zero in on my health issues i even before doctors had diagnosed it.  Now it was more of a direction guide than an actual diagnosis, but that was just me and google. And that was a very hard neurological stuff, with my hip all i did was type in the symptoms and the shinning red flag I experienced and it pulled right up. It was exactly what internet said for hip, but the difference was doctors.  It was 2 years with no firm diagnosis with original doctor vs. 1 day with new doctor to diagnose the tear in hip, which was exactly what internet had led to. I know that's a one in a million case , but in areas where medical options are not great it could really help out.  But you know me and I much prefer physical in depth exam which was how the hip tear was diagnosed after 2 years, MRI was only to verify how bad tear was.  The problem is I fear as time goes on the physical exam will become less and less in depth.

 I was just thinking a program would be able to do that much better than I would with google.



I dont know if you follow IBM in healthcare still but they just teamed up with bionik to work on a human to computer interphase for exoskeletons for the paralyzed patients. I hope they are able to get that one.

itsautonomic

I never heard that term Kimmy, learned something today.

Another thing I would do is lower the requirements for medical school, I do not know about you guys, but people that had 4.0 in engineering were about the last person you would want to do your job unless it means be antisocial and crunch numbers all day because their communication skills lack.  Tons of book smarts but no common sense, and I think the medical field in terms of doctors could use some common sense, people that think outside the norm/box . ( Now there are a few 4.0 students that are the exception , but not most in my opinon)

As an engineer I always have a few issues with my discussions with my doctor, I believe everything has a reason , but she accepts that some neurological stuff does not have a reason that can be found or idiopathic.  I firmly disagree with that, there is always a reason for something to begin, but maybe technology isn't where it can say why yet.  But things just do not pop out of the blue for no reason.  There is always a root cause, now that can be so many things its crazy down to the littlest incident.

Jm.ouchbegone

The practice of medicine used to be considered an art. Now it's an insurance beuracracy. Sucks to be a complicated diagnosis!!