I worked for a few years at a company whose exclusive product line was office-oriented telepresence robots, so I probably have a different perspective than most people here. The model in the article is from a company that was medical-oriented. Sort of a competitor to us, but they got the robot certified as a medical device and sold it at a medical-grade price point whereas we did not go for certification and sold it at an enterprise price point to more office-oriented customers.<p>We had a store in downtown Palo Alto that was a novelty for people visiting. A lot of people were weirded out by the robots at first. Usually they understood a lot better once they drove one around and could understand what they "saw".<p>Most of our customers were regular remote workers and they loved them because they felt like people respected them more than just being a disembodied voice on a speakerphone. Interactions were much more natural and you could use body language to a certain extent. We had several remote workers ourselves and I felt like I could communicate almost as well as if they were there, and found myself giving the robots 'personal space' like I would a person.<p>So I personally wouldn't be offended as long as I felt like the doctor was doing everything they could. In fact I'd much rather deal directly with the doctor so I could pick up on if they had misunderstood something about the case history, rather than to play a game of telephone with a human proxy instead and potentially be left wondering what exactly the doctor had said.<p>So I don't know why the doctor wasn't there that day, but I do understand that he has his own life and other patients to get to. If he's sick, or his kids were sick, or something else came up, I understand that just because he's a doctor who makes life or death decisions doesn't free him from the responsibility of the rest of his life. He may be dealing with a dozen other delicate cases that can't easily be handed off, and it just so happens that mine is the one he can't solve. Pulling another doctor in means that doctor is interrupting that other doctor. He does the triage and sends the nurse in with the robot instead.<p>I suspect Kaiser will revise their policy based on the publicity this has gotten. But while it might show more <i>empathy</i> to have someone else deliver the news in-person, I'm not convinced that it will overall result in better patient <i>outcomes</i>.<p>(I'm also assuming that since it was Fremont, CA, it's not like the robot was the only way to have a relevant specialist there. If it was a second- or third-world country, by all means send in the robot with a pulmonary oncologist to tell me there's no hope rather than having a GP try to make the call).