Re:A new book critiques medicine
by marcinzm on Sunday July 14, 2019 @05:27PM
(#20436167)
>I've long believed that once startups and tech companies get their hands on medical data (patient outcomes, medication treatment outcomes, mal practice rates, surgery outcomes) that a reckoning will take place on the medical industry.
Startups have been going at this problem for years and years already and have had the data. I've worked at them. You know what the goal of most of those startups was? To make money. Patients were a means to an end. If they helped people, it was a thing that happened but not the actual goal.
See, actually trying to help patients and do so responsibly and not just cause a bigger mess is hard. Medicine is complicated, people are complicated, the health system is complicated. Easier to just ignore all that, make some money and sell out before people realize all you did was funnel some money around.
>Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are.
There's plenty of existing literature that notes various medical treatments are worthless. Yet they still happen and are still prescribed and are still paid for. Knowledge doesn't change behavior.
>HIPAA laws are hiding patient outcomes and holding this whole sham afloat.
You can easily get medical billing data for a massive percentage of the US population which includes doctors, dates, procedures, diagnoses and aggregated costs. De-identified but that doesn't matter for these sorts of things.
edit: Also, what is probably the biggest hurdle for health care startups isn't data. It's the fact that AB testing, the cornerstone of how every tech company iterates, is considered unethical except in very constrained forms. Something about there being a difference between crashing the web page of 1% of your customers versus literally killing 1% of your customers.
Startups have been going at this problem for years and years already and have had the data. I've worked at them. You know what the goal of most of those startups was? To make money. Patients were a means to an end. If they helped people, it was a thing that happened but not the actual goal.
See, actually trying to help patients and do so responsibly and not just cause a bigger mess is hard. Medicine is complicated, people are complicated, the health system is complicated. Easier to just ignore all that, make some money and sell out before people realize all you did was funnel some money around.
>Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are.
There's plenty of existing literature that notes various medical treatments are worthless. Yet they still happen and are still prescribed and are still paid for. Knowledge doesn't change behavior.
>HIPAA laws are hiding patient outcomes and holding this whole sham afloat.
You can easily get medical billing data for a massive percentage of the US population which includes doctors, dates, procedures, diagnoses and aggregated costs. De-identified but that doesn't matter for these sorts of things.
edit: Also, what is probably the biggest hurdle for health care startups isn't data. It's the fact that AB testing, the cornerstone of how every tech company iterates, is considered unethical except in very constrained forms. Something about there being a difference between crashing the web page of 1% of your customers versus literally killing 1% of your customers.