In general, visual recognition tasks are hard for automated systems, though they are getting better. We can make a computer that will beat any human being in chess, but a human is still much better at walking into a room and finding the chessboard.

Doing simple measurements is fine for automated systems, and has its place. Making actual diagnoses, though? Humans may be error-prone and conceited, but if my mother, sister, or wife gets her mammogram, I want it read by a radiologist rather than any piece of software.

One of the only solutions that I can see moving forward for EMRs is to have a standard set of requirements such that all of the individual software programs communicate with each other

This is still an issue in the area of digital medical images.

The DICOM standard of transmitting and archiving medical images is something that all vendors use – but the DICOM standard does not include all possible pieces of DICOM information. So 2 vendors required to connect their products (e.g. a ultrasound machine from one vendor to an archive server of another) can both be ‘DICOM compliant’ but still have errors and failures in data transfer if one vendor is using different DICOM information to (for example) sort and filter images.

One of the only solutions that I can see moving forward for EMRs is to have a standard set of requirements such that all of the individual software programs communicate with each other. I very much doubt that the insurance companies will be able to get their act together enough to create such a standard, which means that it may have to come from the US Government.

Give me an objectively trained statistical tested computer system every time.

Almost all areas of skill I’ve looked at, where a computer can make a useful contribution it usually rapidly exceeds practitioners in the field. Chess is a good example. Whilst Kasparov might have been winning 32-0 in 1985 against computers, even then >90% of humans who play chess would probably lose to a computer. These days all but a handful of humans would be crushed.

Quite often these tasks are done by humans long after computers can do them much more effectively, because humans are good at adapting the world to keep them gainfully employed, even when this isn’t in the interests of their clients/customers/employers/patients.

Seriously, I was disappointed (in retrospective) for the $2000 MRI for my own meniscus/ACL tear because I’ve read since that good orthopedists are just as good as the MRIs at diagnosis. My orthopedic doctor called it right himself before any MRI. And he’s cheaper too.

I’ve also read that computers can make drug/ diagnostic mistakes as well, and that this is a big source of medical errors.

Given the updated med list (and I see plenty that aren’t), and things such as height, weight, and, say, recent blood-sugars, the pharmacy portion of medicine could definitely take more advantage of the power of computers to synthesize data according to predefined rules and present suggestions for providers to alter medication as needed. Even now, although very irregularly, sometimes in outpatient I’ll see a faxed notice, usually from the insurance-preferred mail-order pharmacies, suggesting a particular class of drug as an alternative, due to other medications which the patient is on. I’m not entirely sure about their motives, but if that systematic analysis could be harnessed in a neutral/medical setting, that would be nice.

I work in an outpatient setting and cringe whenever I hear that the pharmacy caught a medication allergy/cross-reaction. At least someone caught it. We should have.