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by matheusmoreira·9y ago·view on hn ↗
I think it's fair to assume many if not most students enter medical school with a sincere desire to help. Will that sentiment survive 6+ years of highly stressful education, though?

In my opinion, technology will help reduce the cognitive load sustained by doctors, driving error rates down and simplifying medical education, allowing the professional to focus more on the relationship with the patient.

Many specialized guidelines contain actual algorithms: objective and subjective signals to look for, their interpretation and evidence-based recommendations based on them. In one instance in my education, this manifested in the form of giant lookup tables. I was expected to memorize them and keep doing it again and again when they inevitably change in a few years. To me it was like trying to memorize a highly dynamic version of the periodic table of elements.

One look at it and I knew a computer could fully implement its logic yet my classmates think I'm crazy for even suggesting it. I say let the computer remember that stuff. It won't replace all of medicine, certainly won't substitute for a proper understanding of the disease... But the act of mapping objective data to evidence-based conduct should really have been abstracted away long ago. The electronic medical records system should bring up these guidelines the moment the physician types the data in. If the doctor types in anthropometric data like BMI and other relevant measurements and they indicate obesity, the system should be able to suggest a proper conduct.

Unless they're used in emergency situations where time is essential, doctors shouldn't have to memorize magic numbers much less entire tables of them. With one less thing to cram, maybe school wouldn't be so stressful, doctors would make less mistakes and would also make more time for actually caring about the patient.