How can a person possibly be better at knowing the graph of drug interactions better than a program can?
Like, isn't the human just going to have human error (like the doctor)?
Like, isn't the human just going to have human error (like the doctor)?
One of my bosses has a photo of her and a child's prescription fixed to the wall of a paediatric consultant who would have a killed a child if a pharmacist, my boss, had not queried a prescription.
Checking each other's work is essential in many industries but more so in healthcare.
Whereas the software will gladly just make the same mistake over and over again until corrected.
The dictation on my phone is pretty good. It's still frequently wrong.
The problem is that patient charts are often incomplete, or lacking proper RxNorm or NDC codes for the current medication list. So competent clinicians have to prevent problems from slipping through the cracks using their judgment and intuition. This is not something which can ever be automated (short of a true AGI).
The first seems like a problem - but not something a top 5% wage earner needs to do. The second can be handled by machines just fine.
Addressing gaps and errors in a patient chart is a highly complex task. Low skilled workers don't even know what to look for, or what questions to ask. A lot of this is tacit knowledge which we don't know how to reduce to software.
Humans aren’t perfect, but computer programs are only as good as the programming.
it's like saying autonomous driving is easy you just have to follow the road and read the signs, we have the best minds and unlimited money working on it for a decade+ and it still suck ass
Than it should warn the human doctor before he write the script.
https://www.healthit.gov/test-method/drug-drug-drug-allergy-...
The problem is that the patient's chart may be erroneous or incomplete. So the system can only detect harmful interactions on entries that are fully populated with RxNorm (or NDC) concept codes. Human doctors are expected to manually reconcile the medication list before writing a new prescription. But sometimes they skip that step, or patients don't even remember what other drugs they're taking. In some cases it's possible to query the patient's current medication list from a service like Surescripts but even that won't necessarily be complete and some level of manual reconciliation is still needed.
The other issue with drug interaction warnings is alert fatigue. For certain drugs there are a lot of known interactions, but those are considered minor acceptable risks due to lack of a better alternative. So clinicians get into a habit of ignoring all warnings and miss the ones that are actually serious. From a UX perspective there's no good way to solve this problem in a way that satisfies both the clinicians and the lawyers.
1 human error in the software = millions of people affected
1 human error by a pharmacist = 1 person impacted
Beside overflows, it doesn't error.
And yet, who's writing chess software?
And yet - there's no human in the world that can ever beat a chess program.
And yet, who's writing Google?
And yet - there's no human in the world that can recommend webpages like Google.
The list goes on.
Humans are bad at memorizing a GIGANTIC lists and not making mistakes.
Humans are EXCELLENT where error is okay and it's not really clear what the goals are.
I don't really know anything about pharmacy - but it does not appear to fall into category 2.
Push calculators far enough and they'll all give you different results
We're talking potential human life here.
If you don't see the difference between a dumb game like chess and the infinitely complex world of medication and facing patients I honestly don't know what to tell you. Every customer facing people we replaced by computers degraded the experience for the customers
Humans tell a calculator how to calculate.
It's never wrong. Humans (without a calculator) get math wrong constantly.