What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.
Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it.
People get food poisoning randomly from restaurants all the time. And usually they can never figure otu exactly what it was that caused it, they just carry on and maybe get their rating lowered or license taken away if it keeps happening. Chipotle even just had the same problem.
Yes, they get a bunch of shit for it. But it's not like this is a problem that doesn't afflict the 'normal' food industry as well.
I am sure it has changed over the years but I still have vivid memories of the rodents that ran around the original warehouse they mixed soylent in. It was a joke. They had a bunch of randos mixing powders haphazardly and no sense of proper food prep/sanitation. It was scarier than some of the operations that supplement manufacturers run. I am sure its changed but it blows my mind that this is classified as an ambitious project.
Edit: Here is the video. https://youtu.be/t8NCigh54jg?t=5m50s
Commercial food prep facilities obviously should be held to higher standards, but this facility was basically the equivalent of doing it in their garage for test batch purposes, which I doubt you would bat an eyelash at.
I don't care about the standards they had as a startup before they had a commercial product. I care about the standards they have at the facilities creating the product I would be purchasing.
Later, he goes on to claim that no one is lacking clean water around the 12:30 mark, seems like this CEO is just aimlessly spewing bullshit with no facts to back up what he claims.
But Soylent is supposed to be consumable on a daily basis, so long-term effects are important. Remember the documentary Super Size Me, which tested long term effects of food from a certain fast-food restaurant? [1]
I have to agree with the above poster. I don't understand the hate directed at Soylent, and I don't understand what folks expect them to do. The company is very transparent as well, which is exactly what you'd hope for a company trying to develop a product like this. In many cases, the folks who say the problem Soylent is tackling is borderline impossible are the same ones who expect them to find a perfect formula right out of the gate and see any stumbling blocks as vindication that the whole effort is doomed. These expectations seem grossly at odds to me.
For what it's worth, many people absolutely do eat restaurant food on a daily or nearly daily basis. In the past year of eating a mixture of food from restaurants, home-cooked meals, and Soylent, I've only ever gotten sick (severely so, at that) from restaurant food.
Also, as for that documentary, he just lived off fast food for a month, right? That's hardly long-term. Plenty of folks have effectively repeated exactly the same experiment with Soylent many times over at this point. He also didn't just eat fast food, but intentionally overconsumed (hence the title of the documentary), which is quite contrary to the purpose of Soylent (given that each bottle is just 400 kcal).
You can actually get a balanced daily diet out of mcdonalds if you ask for unsalted fries and get one of their salads once in a while.
Honestly sodium aside the only thing you need to do not to over eat at MC is to get water instead of soda and just regular sized burger.
It will be around 600-700 cals per meal with fries which means you can eat 3 of those a day and maintain weight or even lose some depending on your age, sex, bodymass and daily regiment.
I did this myself around the same time as Super Size Me for a handful of reasons, none of which were to prove a point. I had good results from it. Would I have been even better off if I wasn't eating fast food for every meal? Probably. But I certainly wasn't worse off for eating that way and it scratched the itches which led me to that path in the first place.
This suggests not that they were careless in choosing their formulation or research, but that there was an error in the manufacturing process. This is something that can happen to any company, and has many times. Should they fix it? Yes. But I don't think they should be held to a higher standard here than anyone else.
My feeling? You want to beta-test that with your health, I won't stop you, but I won't join you either.
You don't need to chug slurry 24/7, or eschew all carbs to achieve it. Avoid too much of any one thing, avoid too much processed crap (not because it's inherently bad, but because it's usually loaded with salt and sugar), and learn to cook. It's hardly a science, but you have large historical samples of people living that way, compared to a couple years of someone telling you that you can spend the rest of your days drinking the latest gray sludge.
Ignore the bulk of nutrition "research" which is after all, crap, and focus on the few things that are relatively sound. High fiber, healthy weight, good blood levels, get your nutrients. It's not that hard.
FWIW, on the topic of healthy weight, the Soylent forum has many anecdotes of people who have used the product to lose (or gain!) weight because it allows them to easily count calories without having to spend time scanning products into MyFitnessPal every day and weighing all of their food.
"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
And:
"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
A better one might be "Don't eat anything someone's great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food"
The advertising shows combinations of items, the staff offer upsizing for a deal, etc. Their business model clearly takes advantage of upselling and impulse buys.
SSM is a story about what happens to someone who doesn't know any better and just goes to the convenient restaurant, eating the standard portions they sell. It's best viewed with that other documentary, about the guy who got skinny eating at McDs (and exercising!). It's not (strictly) the food that does it, but the portions and lifestyle it encourages.
Slightly OT: in regard to „long-term“ effects of food/diet, I am curious what you consider long-term? Is long-term a defined timeframe? Is it 1 year, 10 years, 1000 years (multiple generations)?
Really? It seems to me like it's Ensure for computer programmers.
It's intolerably sweet (comes in chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and butter pecan). There's no option for people who want a meal replacement, not dessert.
It gives me indigestion every time I drink it.
I switched to Soylent because it's a better product than Ensure.
I have never understood why people think Soylent is doing something so interesting. It is essentially baby formula for adults. And its not like the nutritional requirements of infants are any simpler than adults. The formula industry has existed for decades and has generally done a good enough job of producing products that are able to make up 100% of a human's diet.
Food is a pretty inefficient thing. In terms of the time we spend consuming it and the resources expended in its production. Soylent is a first step towards a solution to those problems. The theoretical efficiency gain is very high. Of course, Soylent won't achieve that, but the idea is alluring.
Personally, I don't want to drink Soylent for all or even most of my meals. I drink it 1-2x per week. I generally feel better after drinking it than after eating a meal, and i'd say say Soylent is healthier than the average meal i'd make for myself otherwise.
Aside from that, it's fast, cheap, stays good for a long time and requires no cleanup. All that doesn't mean it's going to change the world, but it is a nice addition to my palette of available foodstuffs.
Soylent using experimental ingredients in their products and finding out that they are irritating some users is not the same thing.
If a restaurant told me they used all sorts of "new" industrial ingredients than I would likely balk. I would not want to be in on that beta program.
Especially since, you know, it's likely they are pursuing new ingredients all the time to improve their margins, not the food quality, taste or nutrition.
No, they aren't. There is nothing special about what they're trying to do compared to any other packaged food manufacturer. That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer.
"It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups."
It entirely is. If this happened to Twinkies, people would be livid. I see no reason that shouldn't be the same response here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects
Edit: I think that a well-known incidence of a popular food product which got FDA approval and saw widespread use also causing gastrointestinal distress is entirely relevant to the discussion.
If you disagree with me feel free to use the comments.
I think it's the opposite, people are unnecessarily critical of Soylent. The problem is consumers weren't aware they were allergic to algae flour. It has nothing to do with Soylent's hygiene or formulation practices.
Something about the very idea of Soylent causes people on lots of internet forums to pop out of the woodwork and discuss it quite passionately, from both directions. The basic concept seems to engender a lot of excitement from some and a lot of disgust from others, and when those folks clash online you immediately get 200+ comment threads like the one we're in. This phenomenon has been going on for years at this point, over and over, both here and elsewhere.
Are you talking about the machines that haven’t been released yet, that nobody outside of Apple has ever tried?
Can you explain how it’s a “debacle”?
Here’s a response from Bret Victor, who apparently worked on prototypes 8 years ago: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/793508197336178688
I'm neutral on this debate, but I think you are wrong here. Soylent is a meal replacer. It is supposed to bring you all nutrients you need in a meal.
(even getting downvoted =) the hate against soylent is strong)
I mean I used carnation instant breakfast as an example, that's available in every single grocery store in America.
They come in a wide variety of types - high and low protein, high and low calorie, with or without fibre, designed for naso-gastric tube feeding or for drinking, flavoured or unflavoured, designed to be eaten on their own or to be mixed with some other food stuff, designed to be eaten cold or hot.
The novelty of Soylent is (irresponsibly) marketing these to the public.
Look at Chipotle for instance, they are dealing with similar contamination related problems.
But there seems to be a weird sort of vitriol in the reaction here that doesn't seem like it happened to Chipotle. Perhaps because people see it as an example of the overconfident arrogance of 'tech people'. I'm not sure. But it seems deeply misguided to me.
Yes, something has gone wrong. Yes, they are having trouble figuring out exactly what it was. But so did Chipotle. So do lots of other food companies when things like this happens. Would it be great if this didn't happen? Absolutely. But it's not unprecedented and it isn't at all clear to me that their processes and controls are substantially inferior to the industry standard.
And secondly, they market themselves as a sort of radical new approach to food. They expressly cultivate that image of transformation and self-experimentation. Anyone willing to use a product like that should be more tolerant of bugs than average, IMO. If I got sick from Soylent I might stop drinking it, but I wouldn't say they shouldn't have made the thing in the first place.
However, their process is supposed to decrease the number of issues not increase it.
And I don't think you can extrapolate from a single incident that their process has increased the number of issues. You need more data than that to make a claim of that sort.
Well, a lot of folks would like to see a bit more care paid attention to the entire process. This isn't the first time Soylent has shipped potentially dangerous product.
Not long ago, they shipped their new bottled formula to folks, and it arrived covered in mold! Their snack bars have made people violently ill, and now their powder too. Every product Soylent makes, is making or has made people ill.
Soylent has practically zero quality control/testing, and doesn't have on-site staff dedicated to ensuring their product is safe. They send out a few carefully selected samples to an external lab, but that's far from continuous testing of the product rolling off the line.
Some might attribute it to the "silicon valley" mindset Soylent has. "We'll disrupt the food industry - but we won't bother to learn what it takes to produce uniformly clean and safe product".
There's good reasons the "big guys" spend so much on lab personnel and equipment. If people all around the world started getting sick from Coca-Cola, it wouldn't be good - to say the least.
Edit - Adding sources:
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-20-shipments-were-d...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/reports-of-violent-vo...
[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-soylent-...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12812730
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg&feature=youtu.be...
FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA: http://investors.terravia.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=89...
Sources are well known, a quick search turns them up[1][2][3]. The testing procedure has been disclosed by Soylent during their last debacle, and there was discussion here on HN[3][4].
I used to buy Soylent myself, started at version 1.5 (powder in the bag). But come on, this sort of thing is seriously not OK. You need better quality control, and you need better (and more rapid) testing of product as it rolls off the line. Hunt and pecking clearly isn't getting it done, and problems are slipping out under their noses. It's people's health - nothing to joke at. "Move fast; make people sick" isn't a good mantra.
> FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA
Soylent has no real idea if that ingredient was the culprit (and from the FDA's classification, it seems reasonable to suspect that ingredient is not the problem). For all anyone knows, it could be a combination of ingredients, or not an ingredient at all, but rather contamination in the manufacturing process.
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-20-shipments-were-d...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/reports-of-violent-vo...
[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-soylent-...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12812730
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg&feature=youtu.be...
The idea of using A/B testing for food safety testing is horrifying.
Do you actually think anything bad will happen if you ate for a month sans one micronutrient will permanently damage you?
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...
[1] I didn't stop going because of the incident, I stopped going because I stopped doing what I was typically following with lunch at Chipotle.
My point was that the company ultimately aggressively addressed the problem head-on and very well may have saved the company. The public has no long term memory. Let's compare notes in 2018.
Users should expect hiccups.
This is not the same for a bulk of consumer restaurants.
I had to read that twice before I understood that you didn't mean diaphragm contractions; I was really scratching my head as to why soylent users should expect hiccups!
Despite this hiccup I'm glad they are making the attempt to be able to feed the world a well balanced diet (isn't that the plan?).
Other food manufacturers specialise in trying to poison you in the longer term with salt, sugar, flavour packs, fructose, "low fat", MSG, anemic vegetables, mercury tuna and antibiotic meat.
Right on their index
† For example, milk brand FairLife boasts on its website about "changing the face of the dairy industry through cutting edge innovation." This is in reference to using 22-year-old dairies as their suppliers. Nobody understands it to mean that FairLife might make you sick.
They expect you to get that point based on the price.
Advertisers are simply not going to do what many of these HN comments are demanding. This isn't a tech app, this isn't a linux distro. This is a general consumer facing product.
They don't have an abnormal rate of sickness and they aren't selling people fish oil. They're using experimental products, which they are up-front about, and have experienced setbacks because of that.
A food product that pleases this community would never make it to market or be profitable.
I thought you said it was clearly an experimental beta. They can't have it both ways, where they get a pass for any problems they encounter because it's experimental and not fully beta-tested (and thus not yet ready for general consumption) and they get a pass on vague marketing because it's a general consumer-facing product (which means it's considered "ready" for the general consumer).
> They're using experimental products, which they are up-front about
No, they aren't. That is the entire point I was making in the comment you're replying to. Their marketing doesn't claim to be any more "experimental" than the countless other brands that call themselves innovative.
I don't mean to harp on Soylent, because I mean, I'm not sure how many people were aware that this allergy even existed. Stuff like this happens even to much larger companies. But I think it's reasonable to hold them to the same standards as any other company producing food for the general market, not treat them as though they're in some hazy "public beta food" state that grants carte blanche.
the professional food industry knows damn well there are no acceptable risks. if people are getting sick entire batch numbers are yanked from retail.
the one time a big company purposefully ignored resulted in jail time for executives from Peanut Corporation which knew they were selling contaminated product. As in, people are getting sick and they did not pull it
I guess I don't really see the difference. This isn't unprecedented in the packaged food industry, and it doesn't seem like they're handling it any worse than any other company has.
Except you also have more accumulated debug time/expertise in a typical restaurant. Soylent tries to do a lot of things from first principles that otherwise people have spent many years building: food supply chains, logistics, recipes, kitchen procedures, etc.
Bringing it back to a code analogy, too, most restaurant food is "naturally" a more loosely coupled component model and it is easier to isolate components when debugging (no mayo, hold the lettuce), whereas Soylent is very tightly coupled and it shouldn't be surprising that it may suffer some of the same maintainability concerns in the long run.
There always is residual risk. Some new ingredient tested at small scale might work for 99.9% of people, 0.1% has some intolerance, allergy, negative interactions with drugs or whatever.
That's far better than lactose tolerance levels for example and yet we're not panicking over the presence of lactose in food. We just learn from problems and label appropriately, after the fact.
And in most cases those problems don't even have lasting effects, they just cause discomfort for a few hours/days, in some small fraction of people. Sure, that might not be optimal, but not a catastrophe.
I don't see how one can avoid these issues while testing new ingredients. And if we want to explore sustainable food sources then testing new ingredients should be an option.
Trial-and-error, with someone else's health as the stakes, is apparently the name of the game here.
We can eat small amounts of poison and never notice that it's damaged our bodies, for example. Who knows what the long term effects are.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1834002/#!po=1....
Truly fascinating stuff!
Everything will be damage in large quantities.
And some common things probably do long term damage (e.g. any amount of charring on meat) but we never question them.
My point was that he created the formula through trial and error (I distinctly remember he said he'd put whatever amount he read online was correct and then if he felt sick he'd adjust the amount down; but "getting sick" is a rather extreme indicator). That is, at least prior to investment money (which I hope was at least partially spent on testing the stuff for safety), his safety claims were based off "I didn't get sick in the short term" without any real data on the medium to long term effects.
I mentioned small amounts of poison only as an anecdote that his trial and error testing could potentially have been harming him without him knowing it. That is, it's simply an anecdote to demonstrate that the "safety tests" he had done up until that blog post were themselves anecdotal at best.
I haven't been following soylent since and assume (and hope) that since he took on funding that he then followed up with proper scientific procedures. But people ate his stuff based on that initial blog post, so...
For something that affects us so deeply, it seems like we still know remarkably little about how food affects our bodies/minds. Any research that the Soylent folks do or read is helpful, but I wouldn't expect them to do a 5 year study and be able to suddenly say without a doubt that they have a the perfect formula.
What kinds of poison can you build an immunity to by eating small amounts of it?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3410065/The-man-immu...
Actually there are a few, though it's definitely not the rule - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism
"It is important to note that mithridatism is not effective against all types of poison, and, depending on the toxin, the practice can lead to the lethal accumulation of a poison in the body."
"There are only a few, if any, practical uses of mithridatism. "
I think that will be my takeaway.
In case you didn't know, it looks like Iocane Powder is an imaginary substance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_toxins
Chemistry and biology doesn't work like this. This is excessively simplistic/reductive. Food is a concoction of elements of chemical composition (naturally and/or synthetically produced). The reaction of one chemicals is _dependent_ on all of the other chemicals present and the quantities of them. It very well not have been the algae but the reaction of the algae that occurred when another chemical's concentration was increase and caused a second or third order reaction.
Without commenting on whether this applies to the case at hand: the medical term "potentiate" refers to one substance increasing the effects of another; one substance can also decrease the effect of another. Neither substance in isolation causes a problem, but the two taken together can cause harm.
One common example: you shouldn't drink milk or other high-calcium foods with some types of antibiotics (such as those based on tetracycline), because the calcium binds to the antibiotic and prevents absorption.
A less well-known example: drinking grapefruit juice with various different medications (such as blood-pressure reduction medications, some antihistamines, and some statins that lower cholesterol) can prevent the drug from breaking down as quickly, increasing the concentration in your system, such that it builds up as you take more. That interaction can kill you in various ways, such as increasing the effect of the drug in question, or destroying your kidneys.
Much of the the known mechanics of digestion are molecular, but that's mostly due to the fact that we have a lot better scientific tools to deal with things on a molecular level than we do with macro-molecular constructs.
I recall hearing, also, that if you need both Calcium and Magnesium supplements they're better taken at separate times, as they compete for uptake due to both being +2 ions.
Granted the real issue is drinking more liquor because you don't notice how much liquor you have already drunk.
>It very well not have been the algae but the reaction of the algae that occurred when another chemical's concentration was increase and caused a second or third order reaction.
Mixing Laxatives like prune juice and pineapples can have a stronger effect. Having two new foods that would both produce gas get's a significantly stronger reaction together. Excessive lean meat consumption can cause problems due to protein poisoning. There are also some poisons that act together.
Edit, tiny study: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00544361
The difference here is that Soylent is a "food replacement". That means it's often the only thing these people eat and a small change to the formulation could be a breaking change for a few of them.
I'd really like to see him take a double blind test to see if it's actually true. Saying you have an allergy to monosodium glutamate is a lot closer to saying you have an allergy to monosodium chloride (i.e. table salt) than it is to an actual food allergy.
You need glutamate to live [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter)
In essence they have proved through research that MSG causes no allergic reactions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19389112/ But they can't say there are no reactions at all. (last paragraph http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-he...)
It might be MSG causing a headache or eating too much salt in a single meal but either way the symptoms are avoided by elimination of that from their diet. No deaths, no acute reactions, no more study needed. It hurts when you do that? Stop doing it.
That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies.
Soylent's words:
> "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you."
EDIT: I think this is scumbag behaviour on Soylent's part.
Obviously there are caveats for their allergy claims. The first ingredient in Soylent is soy protein, and while it's not as common as peanut allergies there are definitely people that can't do soy: https://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/soy-allergy
They then made the product with known allergens.
How is that okay?
Your complaint seems to be about one sentence on the marketing page for their original pre-order campaign in 2013 (as seen at the internet archive here https://web.archive.org/web/20140506133101/https://campaign....), which was based on a different formulation of their product without the current problematic ingredient, and didn’t list any detailed nutrition information at all, instead explicitly directing curious readers to their other web pages / blog posts for more information (including a full list of ingredients with the note that the product contained soy).
I don’t quite understand why you think their new product version in 2016 should be considered to retroactively make their (no longer existent) page from 2013 false advertising.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/alexandra-allen-utah-teen-rare-w...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130816104921/https://campaign....
> What if you never had to worry about food again?
> For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous. Soylent will be personalized for different body types and customizable based on individual goals. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost.
> For anyone who struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you.
> Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash.
> There are problems with the current state of food
> 50% of the food produced globally is wasted, and food makes for the largest component of municipal garbage. If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive. 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. 70% of americans are overweight or obese. 1 in 7 people globally are malnourished, and 1 in 3 in the developing world suffer from deficiency. Countless others are living hand-to-mouth, subsistence farming, hindering economic development. Even in the developed world, agriculture is the most dangerous industry to work in by occupational injuries and illnesses, and obesity is on the rise.
> By taking years to spoil, dramatically reducing cost, and easing transportation and storage, soylent could have a dramatic effect on hunger and malnutrition. Proceeds from the purchase of soylent enable us to work with aid partners and reduce hunger and environmental impact both in the United States and the developing world.
> Think about what the future of food looks like. Imagine everyone having a customized, efficient, nutritious default diet and the freedom to eat for leisure as desired. It is a bright, healthy future indeed.
I have problems with a bunch of these claims ("takes years to spoil"), but Soylent do appear to have pulled back from some of them. And donating money to the WFP is always good.
Food companies optimize for palatability and against satiety. Then they brag about it, advertising that you will never eat just 1.
Why do they do this? Because the food market is saturated and getting people to consume more is a good growth strategy.
We can blame the paint industry and the cotton industry for the food industry's mistakes. Paints & stains used to be made from "drying oils" (soybean oil, linseed oil, etc), now they're made from petroleum. Cotton production creates a lot of cotton seed as a waste product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil
Instead of going quietly into the night, the seed oil industry now sells "vegetable oil" for human consumption. Crisco was made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil until it was reformulated in 2007. IMHO, Crisco is still not appropriate for human consumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisco
Charlatanism: it's what's for dinner.
Do you think other food businesses have the source code for human nutrition and do white-box testing on their product?
Of course they do trial and error! It's just that most of the errors happened far in the past.
This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection.
From my perspective as someone who studied drug development and testing heavily in university, and now works as a programmer for medical ehr (hospital) software, I don't particularly think they're being unethical.
The typical Phase 1 trial for a NME (new molecular entity; a new novel drug) is basically giving young dudes some random chemical based on "well it didn't seem to kill the animals, and the statistics we've drawn suggest it won't kill you, want $100?"
Or in the medical software field. Due to the complexity and amount of patient data, and the massive restrictions on HIPAA based PHI, it's very difficult to have robust testing environments for medical software. For a Priority problem affecting patient care, we do our best to understand, resolve and test before support patches code out, but ultimately, we sometimes rely on the same logic. We believe we resolved it, but until it's tested under live conditions, we just can't be positive.
This information is generated by real physicians, real nurses, real aides, etc, in actual care environments. People who trained for over a decade to understand what they're doing.
I trained for a very long time be a programmer, and I have extensive biology education.
But when testing my code, how can I emulate a PhD MD oncologist? How can I emulate a certified Nurse Practitioner, a Home Health Aide or a Licensed Nurse Practitioner? How can I generate an enormous amount of valid, real-world medical data for my test patient? I can learn that coumadin + aspirin creates a drug interaction and is a big no-no for I50.x style heart failure patients. But that's just one little trope I can repeat. There's 10,000 more things they do on a daily basis that I'll never grok.
The short answer is that I cannot. I use the programs, I enter things, I learn and do my best to emulate what my users do, but many of them have spent more time learning and perfecting their job than I have been alive. Plus, I don't have ten millions dollars worth of hospital equipment to generate real data with, to interface with, just various abstractions/test code we use when testing.
In the case of HIPAA/PHI, if there was more freedom to use protected health information, I wouldn't have to emulate medical professionals, I could copy real patient data and test my code against a production database.
But for the ultimate safety of the patients in our care, protected patient data is only allowed in 2 very secure messaging systems we use, and literally no where else.
So it often falls to the other half of our programming staff, the support staff, to take our code, patch it to a real hospital test system (hospitals generally have a live system and a test system physically hosted in their facility), and test against actual patient data from within the hospitals own network. As an application programmer that option isn't really available to me.
So it's two fold: the difficulty of emulating the incredibly technically detailed behaviors of highly educated professionals when testing, and the inability to use real world data for in-house testing efforts prior to shipping code.
As such, it's pretty stupid to be an early adopter here. Just ask children of thalidamide...
Hum... Do you know of any other way to do health research?
Personally, I'm not sure they've failed that, but it shouldn't be allowed under the guise of calling it health research.