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Comment by aladoc99 | Hacker News Reader

Not a risk, a certainty. Until this ruling, not having a physician-patient relationship was an absolute safe harbor against professional liability. It was understood that the clinician seeing the patient had the ultimate responsibility. Now we can program Alexa to say "Send the patient to the ER" and save ourselves a great deal of time.

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The ruling is that when you make a medical decision about a patient you have a physician/patient relationship. You no longer get to say “I was not present so that fact that I provided incorrect treatment instructions is irrelevant”.

If the doctors involved weren’t the ones responsible for allowing a patient to be transferred to the hospital maybe you could more reasonably claim you were giving advice.

But by denying the transfer to the hospital and misdiagnosing them, they were making (and effectively enforcing) those decisions.

If the doc had merely advised, instead of overriding the examine docs opinion, there wouldn’t even be a case because this woman would still be alive. Looks like doctors are free to consult, but are on the hook when they make an overriding decision.

> Now we can program Alexa to say...

I don't really understand your point here I'm afraid. The courts won't give a shit about the Alexa bit, no?

Sorry for being obtuse. The point is that it doesn't take a physician to tell EVERY clinician calling with a patient for possible admission to send them to the ER. If the hospitalist is going to be liable for advice given on patients never seen, he can only err on the side of maximum treatment, since he hasn't had the benefit of seeing the patient and can't necessarily rely on the referring clinician's assessment.

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