> it would be possible to discover long term causal effects that nowadays we don't know because running long term studies is hard,
Companies sell the data to ad companies, before any meaningful research can be done.
Re:Why doctors hate their computers (2018)
by marcyb5st on Monday August 04, 2025 @03:38AM
(#44782996)
Fair, but I said "in an ideal world". Also, not sure if selling ads is more profitable to a product like a supplement because mining the digitized medical records showed that (example I pulled out of thin air) "constantly low potassium increases Alzheimer incidence by 50%" or similar.
Numerous companies have already tried and failed with this approach to medical research. Naively you might think that you could just suck in huge quantities of de-identified patient charts to find all sorts of useful correlations between diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes. But this doesn't actually work because the data quality is so bad: garbage in, garbage out. Doing useful medical research usually requires setting up strict protocols for data entry and patient follow-up.
In an ideal world where every medical record is digitized it would be possible to discover long term causal effects that nowadays we don't know because running long term studies is hard, costly, and in a world where publishing is everything they don't lend to it. So we explored and confirmed only the most obvious long term cause-effect connections.
Therefore, it would enable prevention of some diseases for which we, nowadays, can only have a reactive MO.