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Comment by textninja | Hacker News Reader

> there's absolutely no way dumping a patient's entire medical history into this thing could possibly be considered ethical

Emphasis mine, but isn’t this a rather extreme view to be taking? Ethics deals in the edge cases, after all, so we can easily imagine a scenario where patient consent is obtained and the extra computational analysis provides life-saving insight.

Conversely, the output could mislead the doctor sufficiently to cost the patient their life, so I’m not making any absolute statements either ;)

For the record, and pedantry aside, I do agree with your overall point. Dropping patient history into this thing is incredibly ill-advised. The fact OpenAI retains all your input, including to the API, and provides no low-cost options for privacy is one of the biggest hurdles to major innovation and industry adoption.

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> we can easily imagine a scenario where patient consent is obtained and the extra computational analysis provides life-saving insight

In the US, the HIPAA Privacy Rule operates independently from the HIPAA Security Rule, for good reason. On their own, patients can do anything they want with their own data. But in the context of medical care, patients can't consent to having their personal health data processed in insecure systems. It is the same ethical reason that employees can't waive their rights to OSHA safety rules or why you can't consent to sell yourself as a slave. If you could waive security rules, then every doctor would include a waiver in their intake forms, and it's a race to the bottom. So unless OpenAI has a HIPAA-compliant data security infrastructure, it's illegal and unethical.

Increasingly, medical history includes genetic information. Because of the nature of genetics, your private healthcare data includes data about your parents, siblings, etc.

> Dropping patient history into this thing is incredibly ill-advised.

It's illegal

If my doctor did this without my express knowledge and consent, I'd be looking for a new doctor faster than you can say "f*ck no, absolutely not".

Me too, probably, which is why I specifically mentioned patient consent in my example. I can however imagine other situations where I would be inclined to forgive the doctor, such as if I were in the operating theatre and for some reason there was an urgent need to ascertain something from my history to save my life.

Of course, this is illegal, so the ethics are moot; even if such technology would save my life, there is no way the hospital would accept the liability.

New doctor?

I think you mean, new lawyer.

Absolutely not. This is not an extreme view.

There is absolutely no way that feeding private medical data patients reveal to doctors in confidence to what's essentially the surveillance capitalism industry could possibly be considered ethical. Absolutely no way.

It hasn't even been a week since some medtech got caught selling out data to advertisers. Let us not doubt even for one second that this is unethical and illegal, or even speculate about possible scenarios where it might not be. These corporations do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

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