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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

I'm with you. The sheer amount of human error in the medical field that causes death and injury is astounding [1], and I would gladly put my life in the hands of a capable machine instead of a fallible human if given the choice.

[1] http://www.futurity.org/medical-errors-deaths-1157152/

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I would already be happy if medication for a patients wouldn't be handled by passing paper notes from one nurse to the next. There is no fancy machine learning needed to make sure that you get what the doctor prescribed in the correct dose.

Where do they still do that? I live in a developing country (some people call it third world) and the private hospitals here have been using all electronic medication ordering and fulfilment for quite a while, at least since 2009[1].

Doctor enters the prescription into a networked computer. It goes to a robotic pill picker/packer that affixes the label with instrucitons. Outpatients pick up the medication at the desk on the way out. For inpatients it is sent to the nurses' station on the floor of their hospital room.

It's been a while since I've been to a hospital in the US. I just assumed they were already doing this.

[1] http://medicaltravelsite.com/blog/bumrungrad-utilitizing-med...

Shift change is a dangerous time in hospitals:

It is a big change from the traditional shift change in many hospital units, where nurses going off duty typically confer in a hallway or at the nursing station with the nurse coming on for the next shift, giving a rundown of their patients’ status and needs. In some cases nurses may simply write up a report in the medical record for the next shift to read.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-crucial-half-hour-at-a-...

It also 'helps' that EHR software has been forced onto hospitals at such an early point. My father constantly checks what orders are given to a patient now because one time, an order he placed at a patient's previous visit to the hospital was placed at the current patient's visit instead, almost two months later. Luckily the screw up was just with food assigned to the patient (high fiber diet vs liquids), but imagine if it was something like a drug being prescribed.

I work with EHRs. Patient context bugs (patient number, visit number, chart number, encounter number, or any combination thereof) don't come up THAT often but it seems like everyone has them. It's actually surprising the occurrence is low since most of them are giant piles of WinForms spaghetti by now.

But then again the software in those machines will be written by humans and will most likely have bugs - which might influence the outcome of the operation. So the questions is whether you trust more the surgeon or the engineers of that machine.

As a software developer, I am inclined to trust the surgeon more.

How about a surgeon that's been up for 36 hours, hungry, with a splitting headachy, and some family problems on the mind. A human surgeon might be awesome and can still make a ton of mistakes for reasons unrelated to their medical abilities. Meanwhile, while a programmer could easily make a mistake, other people and tests of the code could spot a lot of mistakes that could be corrected before the system reaches its first patient.

I'm going to take a different tack: How about we stop hazing medical professionals at the beginning of their career and only ask them to work 8 hour shifts with an appropriate amount of time off until their next shift?

Great idea. But how do we get to there from here? Particularly when doctors' professional bodies are large, powerful, and full of people who are convinced that that never did them any harm?

Along with lmm's comment, where would all the extra doctors come from? You can't cut hours worked in half (or close to it) without doubling your staff to meet the demand. US hospitals (especially ERs) are already running over patient capacity in many US cities

Simple, make the hell of residency go away, and allow more foreign doctors to come in to US and practice after going through a reasonable residency program. I have known very smart and competent Russian and Ukrainian doctors who work as lab employees because they are not allowed to practice medicine here.

As a doctor, I am inclined to trust the software developer more.

As a software developer and son of a physician, I'm strongly inclined to trust the engineers more.

As an engineer and son of a doctor, I trust the human surgeon more.

As an MD and a software developer, I vote the machines.

As a software developer who has been stitched back together by an MD who has been on shift for 36 hours, I'm with the machine also. No relevant paternal affiliation.

My guess is that the software will be better at the well know tasks. And similarly to automatic cars, they will struggle with the unusual scenarios. (Saying that I don't know a great deal about surgery).

Before long, there will be cross-trained surgeon-engineers. They probably exist already in small quantities.

I'd argue that a surgeon's time is wasted doing grunt engineering work, they are better as project managers and test engineers because they can come up with tests to prove it works better than the engineers. It's rare for someone to excel at two scientific fields, and you'd need excellent engineers for that kind of project.

As an earlier poster said, it is nothing to do with "trust". Software has bugs, surgeons make mistakes. What matters is the relative degree of statistical risk.

If the risk of falling victim to a bug/mistake by a software surgeon is lower than that of a human surgeon, then simple desire for self-preservation you should choose the software. To choose the human over the software, even when it's provably more dangerous is allowing a baseless prejudice to put you at higher risk. It's equivalent to being given the choice between two human surgeons of differing skill levels, and choosing the lesser skilled surgeon on the basis of their ethnicity.

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