Comment by cainxinth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cainxinth | Hacker News Reader

I know the best doctor you'd ever have the privilege of being treated by. He's smart, kind, knowledgeable, experienced, and has a gift for noticing things others miss. I'd meet other doctors that knew him and they'd say he's the kind of doc they'd want treating their mothers.

He has never been great with computers (though he often reminds me that he successfully created a boot disk with virtual RAM to run Falcon 3.0 on my IIGS when I was a kid). He's not totally incapable of using modern tech, but I am his tech support and we still occasionally deal with basic stuff like how to forward in gmail or save a PDF on his phone.

I remember when his hospital switched to EMR. It was a nightmare for the first six months, but he eventually got the hang of it. Some of the other older docs requested assistants to help them but he was stubborn and prefers self reliance if he can help it and just gutted though it.

That was years ago and I far as I can tell the doctors in his circle are very used to EMR now. I hear some are even liking new AI features that listen to an appointment and automatically draft notes (that the doc obviously must review and sign off on).

My dad retired this summer after more than 40 years of 60-80 hour weeks saving and improving countless lives. He still struggles with computers, but I don't know much about medicine so it's more than a fair trade of advice for me.

I’ve been looking for a good doctor for a while. I’m assuming that you were talking about your father, but if you know anyone you’d recommend (in US) I’d be very thankful.

AI features that .. WHAT?

How does that work? Are you saying that personal doctors appointments are being live transcribed by microsoft or openai?

Over. My. Dead. Body.

At my last doctor's appointment the nurse asked if I was okay with AI conversation transcription and summarizing that the doctor uses. So I had the option to decline.

I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. There are contextual details you might include when talking to your doctor that you wouldn't expect your doctor to write down into your medical record.

I doubt if they're using raw MS or Open AI models (because the whole thing would have to be HIPAA compliant) but yes, some doctors will now ask if you consent to them using AI tools to transcribe the appointment.

That ship has sailed. And that isn’t the only use of AI in medicine. Radiology gets AI generated referrals that the referrer (apparently) reads before sending.

The MR images has signal added by AI in k-space. Then the frequency domain data is transformed to images and AI doubles the resolution (Thanks Siemens deep resolve). Then PACS checks for various things depending on what radiology paid for (stroke, lung lesions, fractures, breast lesions).

The report goes out, ready for your follow up appointment.

In the US maybe, it seems normalised for people to run cctv inside their own homes even.

Can’t see it happening here (eu).

I’m in New Zealand.

> Over. My. Dead. Body.

Maybe literally depending on where you end up dying.

Honestly, what’s the big deal? Before it was ai transcription they still used transcription a lot it was just algorithmic.

If your concerns are about privacy, that’s a seperate issue regardless, whether it’s AI or not doesn’t mean the data is being shared or not, and same with the transcriptions from before.

Yes privacy.

Maybe i’m just a crazy european but I find the concept of always on recording devices completely insane, let alone one in a doctors office.

I dont see how that’s a “separate issue” — separate from what?

There are hordes of startups working in that space, generally using HIPAA-compliant cloud services and/or on-device models, with different startups focusing on different specializations.

I would count them among the most viable startups in the AI space (implementation-wise), and also among some of the most necessary with the aging population. They are also compared to other places where AI is trying to be employed in the healthcare sector on the "lower risk" side of things (doctors still are accountable, and the benchmark are the current badly hand-typed notes).

Oh so the recording is being sent to a compliant service. That’s okay then. I’m sure all these doctors practices with their creaky dusty monitor mounted windows 10 thinkstations absolutely can’t be hacked or that the data could never fall into the hands of the government or anyone else.

Bananas. Why are we letting this happen?

So you are objecting to general electronic processing of healthcare records then?

Not sure how that is realistic in a world where insurance exists, unless your ideal is paper documentation and paying privately for your treatments in fiat. If that is what your after, I guess we've already been in a "over your dead body" world for decades.

No, my doctors surgery is fine to store my patient records internally (e.g on-site).

But no it’s not fine to store those externally without my express written permission , or make recordings and send them to a third party.

It’s realistic here — this is how it works in Germany for decades and i’m fine with it.

edit: storing these on an american cloud provider, or any cloud provider really counts as a third party to me, also.

> AI features that .. WHAT? ... Over. My. Dead. Body.

That in fact may be the exact outcome.

> EMR

Elastic map reduce? The servers AWS provides for running big data processing tasks?

electronic medical record

no more paper stuff so rather some software where they have to type all the details into the computer

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