Comment by icantdrive55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icantdrive55 | Hacker News Reader

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'A good startup idea would be to make a hotlist of the top ~1000 of these obvious, preventable errors.'

I think that's a great idea.

I don't think it needs to be a start-up, but maybe the AMA, FDA, or whomever could put together a simple list of medical preventable errors, and publish that list in a easy to read format.

Just put the information out there. After my bypass; that will be the first book, or website I'm looking for.

Someting like, "After the first heart attack, an aspirin might prevent the second heart attack."

Something that would legally protect the Doctor.

It seems like the entire system is so afraid of lawsuits they just give the bare minimum of advice. And then there're the doctors who just don't really care.

Isn't this already done ? I thought that the us had a voluntary , anonymous database of medical and airline pilot errors

Yes. I've seen several examples of decision support since 2010. It's not easy to train models because the codes for procedures can be ambiguous. Furthermore, since hospital classifiers favor medical error recall over precision, docs can be swamped with so many warning messages that they tend to ignore them.

Take adverse drug interactions as an example. The training data for drug interactions mostly come from adults, so the resulting models do not apply in a pediatric setting. When the models are let loose in pediatric hospital, a high percentage of the drug interaction warnings are false positives, so these type of warnings tend to be ignored.

It seems that the trend is to use decision support with a lot of human oversight and investigation of the raw data to see if the model conclusions are correct.

What you describe to me seems to be a simple UI problem. I'd add a button "False Positive, Don't show this warning again" and flag the "drug interaction" for review. If I get enough of these, I'd change the behavior for all users in the next update.

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