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Comment by SamAtt | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works as an IT person in the Mental Health industry I'd nominate that industry. Mental Health has all the problems of regular health care times 10.

To give the most basic example, there is no formalized charting system in the Mental Health Industry. You have standardized notes that are turned into the county but that's about it.

The industry I work in (treatment of abused children who have been removed from the home) has a 96% fail rate in California. That means 96% of the children entrusted to the state end up in jail or dead by the age of 25 (as of 2003). So if ever there was an industry that needed technology's help it's this one.

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The medical industry needs (good) software that helps with diagnosis. This covers mental health also.

You have symptoms of problem and it helps narrow down. Need a massive database of all known diseases as well as symptoms / remedies. Chart location data for origin of specific disease, (less likely to be rabies if Australia etc) and probability from all factors.

Would require huge amounts of data as well as many man hours to create but a system that does this task would be one of most beneficial medical breakthrough possible right now in my eyes.

Especially in mental health where there are symptoms of many things over many separate disorder, or rare one. It would be a bonus if you could let this information to be fully public, especially if one could direct users to relevant places.

You also need doctors to be willing to accept the software. They may not since they may feel that it makes their job look "easy" and will therefore cut into their incomes.

First, you need software that is actually helpful. This means that it has to assist me with creating and ranking differentials that I wouldn't otherwise have pieced together. I have yet to see any software like this.

Thinking that doctors could be scared that their job looks easy makes me not only excited but all more hungry for this sort of software. This is the same thing labor said as it was mechanized. All sorts of other fields that changed to be technology reliant are the same. The idea that medicine could become "easy" could change this world maybe. Medicine becoming a job for more and more spread out is exciting to me. I hope we can make physicians near obsolete and direct professionals at research to better medicine.

I work at a medical device company that does a lot of software related work. Making their work look easy is NOT an issue. The big problem is that insurance plans typically don't reimburse time spent with technology. For instance in Diabetes treatment a doc could look at your results and provide good feedback via email or phone, but there is not reimbursement code for this. So you take half a day off of work to have a 10 minute meeting with a doc.

Most docs would love more tech in their practices.

such software exist , there's one i know called isabel/isabel health or something similar.there are probably others.

from what i know there's quite a strong resistance from doctors to working with software that automates their jobs. such software usually slows the doctors (he need to type etc) do it's hurts productivity. but to really gain the monetary benefit from using such software, a cheaper , and less knowledgable healthcare provider should use the software(for example nurse doing some jobs of the family doctor like in minute clinics, or family doctor doing some jobs of the specialist). As you can imagine ,shifting jobs between providers in the healthcare industry is not an easy job:)

could something like rethinkautism.com could be helpfull in your industry(treatment of abused children) ?

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