Comment It's just another tool (Score 5, Interesting) 198
And will the system consider the patients age/cost to treat/insurance level/likelihood of patient paying future insurance premiums to make up for expenses?
It will if you program it to. Things like this are tools. As a relatively young doctor (resident) I welcome things like this. Every doctor I know uses reference material, some are printed on dead trees and some are electronic. Today, there's not much difference. But the point it is that there's too much medical knowledge for one person to keep it all in their head at one time. If something like this were to come to market it wouldn't be replacing doctors, it would be augmenting them. Machines do what we tell them to, always have and (hopefully) always will. False rivalries like this completely miss the point. I would love to have a computer algorithm that could correctly diagnose 99% of the time even if it were flagrently wrong the other 1%. That's why humans are in the loop.