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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

No. Just no. Teaching doctors touch typing is tending to the secondary symptom of the fact doctors should not waste time inputting routine data.

What doctors need would be secretarial services trained in medical procedures.

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And by the way, when I was a child, even before the computers came, here is how it worked in Russia.

The doctor was listening to my breathing, looking at the throat, asking me and my mother questions, and saying various medical phrases to her assistant, who was then writing them into my patient records (a thick paper notebook).

This is how all the dentists work that I've seen. Doctor plus nurse. Apparently dentists have more agency over their work environment than doctors do.

I think this is one of the use cases where speech-to-text and (AI) transcription tools would be useful. Of course ideally there'd be two people, one doing the medical stuff and the other then documentation, but health care is expensive enough as it is.

> Of course ideally there'd be two people, one doing the medical stuff and the other then documentation, but health care is expensive enough as it is.

In the 1980s USSR, every doctor actually had a nurse who did the paperwork. And somehow, healthcare was still free.

Medical scribes are a thing. Some provider organizations employee people who attend patient encounters and do all the EHR data entry in order to free up clinicians for higher value work. This generally works well, but it is expensive and payers don't directly reimburse for that service.

It turns out that peach to text is slower than dictating and having a typist type.

The speed at which reports are dictated is incredible and even when familiar with the field it’s hard to understand how the typists are getting it right.

All the dentists I've ever visited have worked in doctor/nurse pairings. The nurse assists in operations AND is the data entry expert.

I think it's just about bureaucratic faux-economical thinking infringing to doctors workspace cutting overall effectiveness.

What we need is a universal standard way to store all of our personal data on our phone and share whatever is relevant at whatever company/government at the touch of a button.

Nor a secretary nor a doctor nor anybody should have to hand-type data that already exists digitally.

I'm so mind-blown that this doesn't exist yet that I feel maybe I should try and build it. I have tried building the next-best thing: OCR based form filling, but hard to get far as a solo FOSS'er.

Problem: there are 19 competing standards

New problem: there are 20 competing standards

There are 0 standards for global sharing of all possible personal data. That I know of.

" this doesn't exist yet"

We have a national health database in Finland called "OmaKanta" (which translates to MyDatabase or something like that). It's not perfect but at least I can trust it with most of my health records, and it's accessible to all doctors working in both public and private sector.

I wonder if the Solid protocol might be helpful here? [0] I must confess I haven't toyed with it so far, but I am looking for an excuse to try it out.

[0]: https://solidproject.org/

Looks cool, but is more abstract/low-level than what I mean. Could maybe be used as a foundation for it though.

Many healthcare provider organizations have standard HL7 FHIR APIs that patients can use to download their own chart records. There are a variety of apps that you can use to call those APIs.

Im talking about a standard GLOBAL way of sharing that exact same data AND all other personal data.

FHIR is a global standard.

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