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Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

Even more interesting would be, to automatically link patients medical history with studies, and show the doctor some suggestions: did you consider rare disease X?; there is not enough data, do test Y&Z because then we know much more

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You mean like this https://blog.tjcx.me/p/40k-fantastic-startup-idea ?

I remember reading that post a while back.

I was surprised the author gave up after he didn't find doctors who would pay for access. The post says he met 10 doctors in the bay area and when none of them became a paying customer, he shut his project down.

If you really think you are making a dent in the worlds health situation, why give up so fast?

10 seems like such a small number. Was he was getting specific feedback that caused him to shut it down? Like were there some sort of legal liability issues or something that made it something they weren't interested in?

The mistake he made was selling directly to doctors, instead of to pharma, insurers or medical systems (Kaiser). Most individual doctors are not necessarily prioritized to provide better care; the other entities are.

Please remember that we do not have a perfect litmus for every disease, especially rare diseases. And statistics nearly falls apart entirely when assessing a single individual. So although i agree there is potential.. I believe the potential is more along the lines of "You have 15 patients in your practice with X, Y, Z active symptoms - it is incredibly likely that 1 one of them have A, or 3 of them have B"

There is significant reason to be hesitant about having an algorithm suggest every sickness under the sun that hasn't been "ruled out" by testing or statistics yet. Ever use WebMD to try to diagnose yourself?

In other words, I worry about what this approach would do the signal to noise ratio for doctors.

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