Comment by JshWright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JshWright | Hacker News Reader

"If 0.1% of PCRs have mistakes that waste an hour of a doctor’s time, that’s 30,000 doctor-hours not spent on other patients."

There is a 0.0% chance that this happens (in my opinion as a paramedic). If I had to guess, 0.1% is probably the rough order of magnitude of the frequency with which doctors look at the PCR at all. We give a verbal report which covers the important details. I would be hard-pressed to come up with an error that could possibly waste an hour of someone's time.

"Did that quarter-second lag kill anyone? Was there someone who wouldn’t have died if the ePCR was just a little bit faster, fast enough to be usable? ... It could have saved the person the EMTs couldn’t get to because they lose an hour a week from extra PCR overhead."

Similarly, no. There is no situation in EMS where 250ms is the difference between life and death. It's not like the tones drop for a call and we say 'gee, I wish I could go help that person, but I still have this chart to write...'.

Performance absolutely matters (ironically, I'm a software developer for an EMR at my day job), but a little lag in an ePCR isn't going to kill anyone.

> There is no situation in EMS where 250ms is the difference between life and death. It's not like the tones drop for a call and we say 'gee, I wish I could go help that person, but I still have this chart to write...'.

That wasn't how I read it. I may be incorrect, but my interpretation was that the 250ms didn't make the software too slow to be effective but rather too slow to be user friendly.

The idea isn't that it directly killed people by being slow, but rather that it was not adopted because people didn't like using it, and on the paper alternative, mistakes were made that would have been impossible to make on the computer.

I don't have a choice about whether I use an ePCR or not, New York State (and, AFAIK, most other states) mandates it.

The only place where PCR errors matter is on the witness stand... The PCR is certainly important, but any critical information is conveyed in a number of redundant ways, and I would be very surprised if there's been a single incidence of a PCR error resulting in a patient's death.

PCRs are not treated with a great deal of trust, nor should they be (I say this as someone who has written thousands of them). We're dealing with incomplete and conflicting information, patients that actively lie (or, more charitably, forget) about their medical history, and in the case of critically sick patients (the ones that are at risk of dying in the first place) I am more focused on the acute management of their condition. No one expects a PCR to be accurate in every detail. That doesn't mean it's useless, but it also means the system expects there to be errors and has redundancies in place to account for that.

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