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Comment by hershel | Hacker News Reader

Medical professionals have used FUD(fear,uncertainty,doubt) and requiring very high burden of proof(trying the technology for a very long term, even though preliminary results show favor ability) for ages as a tactic to scare the public and politicians from accepting innovation and change.

I wonder, what are good tactics to fight such efforts ?

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I'd start by highlighting the truth at every opportunity, which is this:

Medical mistakes kill an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Americans every year[1], making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer[2].

"Frank from IT" isn't killing those patients - doctors and nurses are, largely through really stupid stuff like failing to wash their hands adequately, leading to hospital acquired infections.

[1] Journal of Patient Safety https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/781687-john-james-a-...

[2] CDC http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

That's where you're wrong. The user interfaces to so many medical devices are tacked on, almost as an afterthought. The devices are made by hardware people, and the software people never get a look-in (as usual). They're messy to use and make it easy to do Bad Things, and the testing (though generally better than a web-app) is still frequently lacking. The canonical example is the Therac-25, which killed a number of people after a software bug blasted them with massive amounts of radiation. These problems still happen now - the modern radiotherapy machines are still capable of delivering horrendous doses, but the biggest killers now are infusion pumps - which have many different, confusing interfaces which make it easy to make big mistakes really quickly (55,000 adverse events, 710 deaths over the course of just five years).

The regulators are incompetent or captured, and the nurses get blamed for the fatalities.

http://cs.swan.ac.uk/~csharold/cv/files/IHCIkeynote2013.pdf

Yes, medical mistakes are problematic, but to say it's generally the staffs fault is a gross oversimplification. If it's because staff aren't washing hands, it's because the operational procedures of the industry are bad.

Just to be clear, those 200,000-400,000s aren't all things like washing hands. They occur when there are misdiagnoses or when an inappropriate form of care is chosen, as well. Which is probably the vast majority. Doctors and nurses aren't going to get better - medical training is already some of the most rigorous around, and the bad ones usually don't make it.

What does make a difference is making things easier for them - simpler devices, better analysis, better operations procedures. Trying to place some kind of blame on doctors and nurses for killing their patients (in the abstract statistically-large-number-of-people-died case) is stupid - if it happens everywhere, it's the system's fault and not the individual's.

Umm... here's a passage from a year old Forbes op/ed: "... about half of real health expenditure growth is attributable to medical technology. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation goes on to say that advancing technology may have a particularly large impact on spending in the U.S. because of “few requirements that effectiveness be demonstrated before technologies are used broadly and concern that their application tends to go beyond those patients likely to benefit the most from them.”"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/04/03/whos-to-blam...

The things that medical providers block are often things that would reduce costs, for example enabling mid-level workers supported by tech do some of the doctor's jobs at lower costs, and low cost eye exam kiosks.

And sure, there's a problem with medical tech increasing expenses. That's another problem that needs solution.

Counter tactics? The bill from doing it their way.

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