There should really be a system that does what WebMD tried to do, but actually does it well.
You’d put in your symptoms and background info (e.g. what country you live in, your age), it would ask you clarifying questions (“how bad is the pain from 1 to 10?” “which of these patterns is most like the rash?” “Do you have a family history of heart disease?”) and then it would give you a posterior distribution over possible conditions, and a guess about whether you should go to the emergency room or whatever.
Is this just much harder than I’m imagining it would be? It seems like the kind of thing where you could harvest likelihood ratios and put them all into a big database. Is there some regulatory thing where you can’t practically offer this service because it’s illegal to give medical advice or something?
Assuming that you actually get it to work and that you provide, at best, mediocre diagnostic (which is already really difficult to make), this is a regulatory nightmare and a plain hazardous tool to exist.
I’d even say that people cannot make decisions based on statistics (I doubt that most can even differentiate between anecdotal advice and scientific evidence) that’s why physicians make these decisions for them and if ever a tool is allowed it would only be available for physicians.
For anyone interested in making this sort of tool, the enthusiasm doesn’t last a day or two after talking to a lawyer for a few minutes!
One friend pointed out that you might be able to avoid some of the pitfalls by releasing something like an open source desktop application that requires you to feed it a database of information. Then you could build databases like this in lots of different ways, including anonymous ones or crowdsourced ones. And in this case it might become a lot harder to claim that the creator of the application is liable for anything. I might actually want to talk to a lawyer about this kind of thing, if the lawyer was willing to put on a sort of “engineering” mindset to help me figure out how you might make this happen without getting sued. So if you know anyone like that, I’d be pretty interested
There should really be a system that does what WebMD tried to do, but actually does it well.
You’d put in your symptoms and background info (e.g. what country you live in, your age), it would ask you clarifying questions (“how bad is the pain from 1 to 10?” “which of these patterns is most like the rash?” “Do you have a family history of heart disease?”) and then it would give you a posterior distribution over possible conditions, and a guess about whether you should go to the emergency room or whatever.
Is this just much harder than I’m imagining it would be? It seems like the kind of thing where you could harvest likelihood ratios and put them all into a big database. Is there some regulatory thing where you can’t practically offer this service because it’s illegal to give medical advice or something?
Assuming that you actually get it to work and that you provide, at best, mediocre diagnostic (which is already really difficult to make), this is a regulatory nightmare and a plain hazardous tool to exist.
I’d even say that people cannot make decisions based on statistics (I doubt that most can even differentiate between anecdotal advice and scientific evidence) that’s why physicians make these decisions for them and if ever a tool is allowed it would only be available for physicians.
For anyone interested in making this sort of tool, the enthusiasm doesn’t last a day or two after talking to a lawyer for a few minutes!
One friend pointed out that you might be able to avoid some of the pitfalls by releasing something like an open source desktop application that requires you to feed it a database of information. Then you could build databases like this in lots of different ways, including anonymous ones or crowdsourced ones. And in this case it might become a lot harder to claim that the creator of the application is liable for anything. I might actually want to talk to a lawyer about this kind of thing, if the lawyer was willing to put on a sort of “engineering” mindset to help me figure out how you might make this happen without getting sued. So if you know anyone like that, I’d be pretty interested