The Velluvial Matrix

What he's saying applies to research nowadays too, especially biology-related. People in e.g. my lab (neuroscience) come from EE, Bio, Physics, Medicine, Stats, CS ...<p>It's working, though. Care <i>is</i> getting better than ever. Science <i>is</i> progressing faster than ever. We just need more. More funding, more education, more scientists, more talent. Especially in biology, we need a lot more computer scientists, especially the theoretical kind. A probabilistic pi-calculus would do wonders for dealing with the sorts of errors that cost Duane Smith his digits. We need more mathematicians to help us handle systems of vast and irreducible complexity, and we need more truly excellent experimentalists to pull off what was thought impossible.<p>That's what will help medicine the most, I think. More and better science, and intelligent people thinking rigorously about process. It costs money. My "one wish" would be to redirect the resources we've wasted in our War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism / the Middle-East, and throw it all at the War on Human Ignorance. In truth, it's amazing how cheap progress is. The cost of developing a new cancer drug is <i>way</i> less than the cost of invading Iraq. It's actually <i>cheaper</i> to save lives rather than kill people!<p>This post doesn't really have a point. I just wanted to express my vote of total optimism for science in these days of rampant pessimism. It works, it's actually pretty cheap, and it gives back a thousand times more than what we put in. If you're in college and you're reading this, please become a scientist (or a doctor) :)

The interesting part to me is that Atul Gawade is one of the few doctors who is willing to say<p>"I don't know."<p>What worries me are those that attempt to fake it instead.

What we need is the francise model they are starting to explore in India. Repeatable processes encoded in easy to follow three-ring binders; checklists and procedures that anyone can follow. This will take care of the basics and free up resources for the gourmet care we all need from time to time.

This article was extremely interesting. I remeber wired reporting on a system which would allow doctors to give a list of symptoms and have the most likely diagnostics listed by probability. Not sure of the name but technology like that has incredible potential. I also remember the article mentioning the reluctance of doctors to use it.<p>This kind of problem seems more widespread than only in the medical field. This stuff just reminds me of what Doug Englebart was trying to do with his NLS system. Augmenting Human intelligence. Were reaching the limits of what single humans are cable of retaining and processing in their daily jobs. I think that it's time for stuff Englebart did in the 60s to be rediscovered. While the internet is great, it's potential hasn't been maximised in area like this. Englebart's vision went much further than just google. Wolfram alpha is getting close to this in a way but still not far enough. I'm sure someone is already starting to develop this stuff (post some links if you have any).<p>I can just imagine an iPad application (preferably android table app ;p) for doctors which implements the system I talked about at the beginning of this post. Giving doctors on the go access to a database of diseases and medical records of the patients and a way for the computer to anylisze the data and return the info right there (powered by a huge hadoop cluster). Typing a few symptoms, getting the list of possible diagnostics and viewing some checklist of things to do. This would in no way replace doctors, I don't believe that we have reached a point where you don't need a human person to judge the validity of the computer guesses. In fact, assessing the symptoms is probably going to require a trained professional for ages but, at the same time I think there is massive potential for this kind of AI in these information intensive fields.<p>There is definitively lots of startup potential in all this.<p>I see a lot of startups solving easy problems (for good reasons) but this is worth a 10 twitters in value.<p>If I wasn't doing stuff in the medical imaging field (Brain imaging specifically) I'd go out and build this.

What incentives are there for engineering a better process? Seems like PPOs and HMOs would both want this. But I guess only HMOs are the only ones who have a chance of making progress here.<p>Kaiser does seem to be making progress here, but I'm not sure how fast it is.

Incidentally, for the recent "what problems need solving?", this is one.<p>Interperson coordination. I want it for small team IT project work, they want it for multiteam medicinal work.<p>We have decent task schedulers in computers at the kernel level, multiple processes, multiple threads, RPC, yet in people terms we're still on email, shared docs, waves, CRUD-dy database frontends with no central driver.<p>And I don't want to be the central project manager myself, tracking lots of data and sorting it into order - that's machine work.