I don’t think this is anywhere near enough of an impact in terms of “false positives” to be a net negative.
10% positive predictive value for something like this is pretty good. It’s certainly better than “hey look at this weird mole.”
That's not happening. Only a small number of people went to the doctor. Of that number, 9 out of 10 ended up not being diagnosed with a (new) problem, but it seems that even some of them had related problems that were already diagnosed.
Regardless, we don't know the false positive rate. It's not 90%. You need to know the number of negatives before you can calculate it.
> No, not by a long shot, because... [opportunity costs, overloading the healthcare system]
Totally agree with all of that.
Why don't EKG salons exist (like nail and hair salons)? New market opportunity created by the Apple Watch?
No, not by a long shot, because physicians are a pretty rare commodity, care is expensive and sending nine out of ten people to the doctor for no reason is a huge drain on the system and public healthcare resources.
if you see this as success I don't think you're familiar with the concept of opportunity costs. For people who don't have any symptoms, have no history of heart conditions or other underlying risks, running around with an EKG on your wrist is absolutely ridiculous. All it will do is inflate healthcare costs with little improvement in outcome, which is already the primary disease of the US healthcare sector. And of course apple's and the healthcare sectors primary motivation to sell these things to begin with.
Not every cardiac condition even requires immediate attention by a physician, I wager most of the anomalies that show in the 10% are benign arrhythmias that would have been picked up on a yearly routine checkup in due time.