| When I go to the doctor, this happens: - Doctor says "Say ahhh" and looks in my throat with the thingy - Doctor looks in my ear canals with another thingy - On other occasions, my other vitals are taken, maybe some vials of blood, etc. Again, a student can do this. I'm asked a few general questions, with some follow-up questions based on my answers. Then the doctor puts this information - along with my patient history - into the decision tree in their head and comes up with a result. If the doctor is stumped, I'm sent to a specialist. The above can be automated, plain and simple. It would also be an improvement over my experience of the health system - in Canada. I have never seen my GP pull up a multi-year graph of my blood pressure, weight, or whatever. What I am describing is a system for creating regular data points of the kind currently used in diagnosis. What I fail to understand is how you cannot see that there must necessarily be predictive value in such a database. Even if only 80% of the job can be automated, public health would improve immensely if the global population can do regular checkups like the above cheaply. |
I can see allright. But you cannot see that your hypothetical database is lacking most of the info because your doc actually mostly evaluates you by looking at your general composure and relying on X years of experience and a bit of knowledge shoves that into the really complex decision tree in his head: "Hmmmm... this guy looks mostly fine."
Now, you feed your database to the latest deep-learning shiny thingy that tells you: "this guy has X% chance of having a horrible cancer, but I can't explain why". So you enjoy many months of costly investigation because you don't want to miss something, right? And after the fact, it is discovered that the lack of standardization in measurements caused the algorithm to decide that the light hue in the office was a sign of cancer.
All that to say that yes, someday what you are imagining may well be possible, but we are really very far from having the technology to do that now.