This should become standard. When blood works or whatever exam results are available they should go through some kind of automated system that can flag critical situations like this, without waiting for a doctor.
While this might not be standard everywhere in the world, and probably isn't, if one was concerned about their health and had access to their results themselves, wouldn't you look at them?
This reminds me of the redditors who post questions about mundane government services where it would be quicker to simply call the agency in question and ask.
Depends on the service / agency. Some have long wait times.
Heck ChatGPT might be quicker than both reddit and the agency at this point, and I'm not an "AI bro" by any means... But I gotta accept when its usefulness actually works.
Wow oh wow does this depend on the agency, and depend on the question, and assumes you even know how to ask the question the right way. And I think considering that, the analogy operates quite well. People often don't know how to ask about medical things, they just describe symptoms ("platelet count" probably isn't a highly googled term for self-diagnosis). People do similar things when they have a problem with government and don't know where to turn, may not know which agency to contact, or how navigate that agency's phone trees, etc.
And funny enough, most of the responses are "Did you call <agency_name>?".
Usually it's the DOL which around here is quick to get a hold of via phone.
Are you saying that the doctor failed to take action on something that was at a concerning level on her labs? Or that she should have scanned her labs for anything that was on the edges of those normal ranges?
I generally agree that more data is a good thing, but simple blood work can be kind of a large amount of data now that's not immediately recognizable to the average person. However, this is exactly the case where I want more assistance with AI... there's simply too much data for me to reliably tell what's meaningful and what's not anymore. AI can process a bunch of data and tell me what I need to know in about a second or two.
I have a rare disease which causes an obscure blood marker to basically jump two orders of magnitude.
If you google this jump marker, basically all the links you find are about a deadly leukemia that you will be dead of in six months.
My appointment with my doctor was two weeks away. Those were very very dark two weeks.
I definitely think you should go over the results with your doctor, but Google or even ChatGPT is not a doctor
From the post that her doctor hadn't yet reviewed the labs and the turn around time for the doctor was 2 - 3 days. I'm naturally curious about my own results so I do look at them and search the WWW for the meaning of the results if the lab tech doesn't provide any contextual clues. If WebMD says I have Lupis and I'm going to die tomorrow, then I'll reach out to my doctor in some form or fashion.
> simple blood work can be kind of a large amount of data now that's not immediately recognizable to the average person.
You'll find every [common] blood test has descriptors on the Intertubes from a variety of sources. Insurance, in the US anyway, isn't going to allow niche complex tests without going through weeks of denials. And even when doing standard blood workup, you're not going to need to know the items in the green, just the one or two out of range.
You're of course free to allow AI to invade your medical records as you see fit if that is the way you want to go about it. My point above was that "AI" wasn't necessary nor revolutionary in respect to identifying the author's medical issue.
> When blood works or whatever exam results are available they should go through some kind of automated system that can flag critical situations like this, without waiting for a doctor.
We already have this. Based on either individual results or how results relate to each other.
Labs will detect critical results and then a range of things happen:
- a scientist may repeat or check the result if the value is extreme, to ensure it isn’t an error
- a scientist may alert a pathologist to the result immediately
- a scientist or pathologist may contact the referring doctor/hospital by phone to provide the result immediately
- in some cases, the lab will contact the patient directly (if they need to go directly to hospital for example)
This also gets done with radiology.
This then gets followed by the official report in hours to days depending on how much confirmation is required.
Sometimes what’s “normal” is highly dependant on other factors. In that case you might get a table or other comparative information provided.
That said, some results are still concerning if they’re “high-normal” or “low-normal”, and some results are not that worrying even if they’re slightly abnormal.