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Comment by ljchen | Hacker News Reader

My personal feeling is that medical practices have not evovled too fast with computing. Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering etc all contributed a lot to how doctors treat diseases. But whether medical records are digitialized or not is not significant. It helps, but does not increase cure rate. Old fashioned doctors have good reasons to reject. But they do not say no to new medicine, new devices, new procedures.

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> My personal feeling is that medical practices have not evovled too fast with computing.

You should see "computing". Resizing a window in Windows has become a lost battle. Working with files on Android is a torture. I really hope that "medical practices" will not "evolve", like "computing" has.

I fully reject your statement about not digitizing being insignificant. And there are several reasons for it, but the main one in my mind is about prevention vs curing.

In an ideal world where every medical record is digitized it would be possible to discover long term causal effects that nowadays we don't know because running long term studies is hard, costly, and in a world where publishing is everything they don't lend to it. So we explored and confirmed only the most obvious long term cause-effect connections.

Therefore, it would enable prevention of some diseases for which we, nowadays, can only have a reactive MO.

> it would be possible to discover long term causal effects that nowadays we don't know because running long term studies is hard,

Companies sell the data to ad companies, before any meaningful research can be done.

Fair, but I said "in an ideal world". Also, not sure if selling ads is more profitable to a product like a supplement because mining the digitized medical records showed that (example I pulled out of thin air) "constantly low potassium increases Alzheimer incidence by 50%" or similar.

Numerous companies have already tried and failed with this approach to medical research. Naively you might think that you could just suck in huge quantities of de-identified patient charts to find all sorts of useful correlations between diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes. But this doesn't actually work because the data quality is so bad: garbage in, garbage out. Doing useful medical research usually requires setting up strict protocols for data entry and patient follow-up.

Ehh, I think there’s a pretty consistent pattern of doctors rejecting pretty basic technologies or procedures that lead to positive outcomes for patients if it’s seeking to address the fact that doctors are human beings that can make mistakes. Medicine is a field full of massive egos.

Yeah I mean let's keep in mind that the man who found hand washing stopped patients dying of infections was roundly ignored [1] for too long.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

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