Tag: future

2015 med tech

Giving blood for analysis at Quest Diagnostics involves:

– Doctor filling in a huge request form with several carbon copies (!)

– making an appointment online

– remembering to bring the actual physical sheaf of forms with you to the blood-collection center

– patient filling in additional information on various forms, including social security number (I left that blank, and no one said anything).

– waiting for 30 minutes past the appointment time, because there is only one person in the entire office, and everything is backed up

– phlebotomist hand-writing labels for each vial, with patient name and the name of the test, then sticking them on each vial

– phlebotomist finding one of the orders too ambiguous for her liking, then failing to reach the doctor’s office by telephone, and asking you (the patient) to follow up with doctor the next day, then come back another day just to do that one remaining test (and no, blood for that can’t be collected now).

– phlebotomist spending inordinate amount of time keying all that information into their (presumably proprietary) system.

It is friggin’ 2015! Quest Diagnostics, as I understand it, is the largest provider of such services, and if they are this archaic, I can only imagine what smaller providers are like. Also, I can imagine how many errors must happen.

There is no reason Quest should even be in the business of managing all this information at all. It should be a third-party system, where the doctor orders the necessary tests in a browser or an ipad app, the patient makes an appointment, and at the lab the labels and the instructions for the phlebotomist are pre-printed just before that appointment. Billing and results information could be done seamlessly, too – and there would be a lot more transparency as to what things would cost and what would be covered.

Patient privacy would be important, but it wouldn’t be any harder than the many systems that fin services use to for OTC trades – besides, there is no reason not to obfuscate the patient identity. Patients could be assigned arbitrary numbers that could be stored in a chip on the insurance card and unlocked by the PIN that only the patient has.

Why hasn’t this been done yet? I know both MS and Apple tried to go after this in the past, but must have hit the wall. There’s got to be something that I just don’t know yet.

I both like reading David Mitchell and hate his politics. In Bone Clocks, that I just finished, among many other things, he talks about the time, in the near future, when there would be no more vapor trails, and how people would miss them. His bitter vision of the future presses all the right buttons for my paranoia. His lyrical pessimism reminded me of why I stopped subscribing to Harpers. His vision, despite all that lovely attention to detail, is too linear and simplistic, I tell myself, and I keep picking it apart, convincing myself that he is wrong, and that our western liberal secular enlightened civilization is not going to fail and collapse the way he predicts, in 2030s, even if it may often seem to go in that direction, and that there are enough counterforces (comprised of each one of us conscious humans, and the complicated systems we’ve built) to push it away from the not-necessarily-inevitable collapse.

But still, I now stop and appreciate the contrails, and the social order, and shops full of food, and all the other technology wonders that we have now, and know that they can disappear so easily.