California Healthcare Provider Wants Illness-Predicting Algorithm
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 30, @07:04AM
from the make-hospitals-smaller dept.
alphadogg writes "The Heritage Provider Network wants to do for healthcare what technology in the film Minority Report did for police work. In other words, it wants to use technology to pre-emptively predict when illness is likely to strike and take measures to prevent costly hospitalizations. This week Heritage announced that it was offering a prize of $3 million for any developer who successfully created a 'breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.'"
Oh. Lord!
An insurance company using “available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” much less an algorithm based thereupon, “to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” would produce a whole stack of disasters for patients, the healthcare system, and its own ‘bottom line.” “Minority Report,” to which the contributor compared this, was a sci-fi horror show, so I hope he understood this fact, but many others may not.
An insurer spending $3 million on this project at this point in the process of computerization of patient health records, federal subsidies for this and related processes, and medical knowledge, would guarantee the ultimate “garbage in, garbage out” results.
If anyone ever invents an algorithm that would have “predict[ed] and prevent[ed]” most of my hospitalizations, or most of those of others that I know about, he could undoubtedly invent another one that would “predict and prevent” death, injury, losses in the stock market or casino, divorce, and inclement weather.
I’m not sure what kind of medical records this insurance or healthcare company may have, or think it has, on its customers or patients, or how far ahead of the rest of the country California health records just might be, but I’ve been dealing with, trying to get, and trying to unscrew my own and my clients’ healthcare records for many years, and most of them are somewhere between useless and downright dangerous even without having been run through some new algorithm, which woujld present whole new universes of possible errors.
I live in an exurban county with one [public] general and one private mental hosipital, one other dominant lab for diagnostic scan, and assorted other procedures, and lots of doctors’ offices and practices, several of which have osme of this same kind of equipment. The hospital, the primary private imaging company, used by many doctors, and the various doctors’ offices can’t read each other’s MRI, CT, and other results. I fell and broke my wrist, was taken to two successive emergency rooms and then to a third hospital in another county becxuse nobody here and available did hands and wrists, and we ended up with at least six (6) different sets of results produced at different entities in four counties. It was not until some time after my surgery that my hand surgeon sent me to another facility, that can take X-ray and MRI pictures showing vital information that the others could and did not, that we discovered a major part of the problem. Except for the X-rays on film, nobody has equipment that can read all of these.
The local hospital’s off-site records contractor charged me several dollars a page for what were supposed to be records of several stays for different things, not one of which could have been, much less was, predicted or diagnosed hours, much less days or months, in advance. The hospitals have no copies of these that I can get. Every page of these records, from several stays in two of the hospital’s facilities in different towns, was totally blacked out except for a white dot in the center.
When I lived in Dallas earlier, someone with an X-ray lab and I discovered that they had somehow managed to consolidate the records of several people, representing two sexes, two races, sixty or more years’ differences in ages, over a foot variations in heights, some with and some without bullets, seen over many years by different doctors and hospitals, into my medical file. I think the one with the bullet, which tipped off the technician, may have been my dad, over sixtyyears older and considerably taller, but don’thave a clue who the others were, most of whose files, like other medical andmedical billing records I have seen, were identified only by last name and initials—and there are two spellings used even in my dad’s family and generation.
I had to have one set of X-rays of something else done over because the doctor who ordered them and hired the mobile contractor who took them closed her office without notice and apparently threw all patient records in the dumpster. Two hospitals where I had longer stays likewise closed down and dumped their records, and my doctors don’t have and can’t get copies. One set of records of a very extensive and expensive set of work-ups the doctors on staff at one of them had done on me were contracted from outside providers and we don’t even have their names and addresses, but my inquiries indicate that only the hospital that ordered them everhad full copies. One key set covering several years was at the University of Texas Medical School at Galveston, and all their records were washed away in a hurricane and flood. We discovered in law school in 1961 that my entry physical in Dallas indicated that I had, and told the doctor that I had, a heart attack, the doctor had died, and nobody else can correct that record. We think that’s the medical record that led to my being fired from one job but we couldn’t get the evidence.
Assembling the records I am expected to produce in an upcoming proceeding, if it could be done which it can’t at any cost, would involve 72 years of medical records, produced by doctors most of whom are dead, in several facilities in several states covering much of the United States. One facility where I was actually or allegedly seen, dfiagnosed, and treated over a period of several years delayed for months and then sent me about twenty pounds of records, from which practically every substantive page had been removed leaving little but useless transmittal sheets. The 958 pages I received from two stays at another hospital, getting which took years and a real hassle, includes records of statements I never made, which the evidence from both sides of a lawsuit clearly shows I never would have made, to doctors and others I never met, while omitting the original record of the one doctor I did see and talk to, who I had known for years. There are lots of pages of illegible notes relating to treatment that never happened.
The privacy implications of the medical records project are alarming, to say the least. I have read on credible computer sites that legl counsel for the big companies working on, and receiving substantial governmentmoney for, that, they insist that HIPAA and other applicable gfederasl and state medical privacy laws don’t apply to them. I can’t legally find out whether or not my wife has picked up her prescription, and creditors insist they can’t tell me how much to pay on her credit account even with the account number and other identifying data, but MSN publishes advice to employers to get complete health records before hiring or keeping any employee and several sites offer such supposedly privileged information along with unlisted phone numbers, Email, etc.