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Robots in Medicine
eberry writes "The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center will use a robot to mix intravenous medications and prepare its syringes. The robot, about the size of three refrigerators strapped together, can fill 300 syringes an hour, each with a custom dose and a bar-code label routing it to a particular patient. The robot should reduce the potential for errors and improve patient safety. The robot still needs further approval by the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy, but that should come within a month. It should be noted that five Cincinnati hospitals already use computerized pill-dispensing systems." On the other hand, reader Bobbert sends in a cautionary note: "'A group of German patients has filed a lawsuit against financially beleaguered Integrated Surgical Systems Inc., alleging that the Davis company' Robodoc surgical robot is defective and dangerous, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.' So now with robotic surgery, both the doctor and the robot can liable for damages. Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery."
Will these robots "sense" possibles error in the prescription though? For instance if the doctor entered the incorrect dose, an experienced nurse might just be able to pick it up, but a robot will just do as told.
It reminds me a tail strike incident where the pilot entered the incorrect weight and the system didn't pick it up. The incident report stated that the weight/speed combination should not have been allowed by the system at all, but nobody wrote that checking code at the beginning.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The governments of Vancover, Canada and Amsterdam, Netherlands have placed orders of 10 of these machines each presumably to placed on street corners.
I hate frivilous lawsuits, but at least with a human doing the filling of drugs there is some common sense that can be a fail-safe. With a machine all it takes is a bug to have 300 vials of poison dealt to unsuspecting patients. Won't there still need to be human oversight?
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Until the system is fixed so doctors and nurses don't have a constant case of jet lag from being up for different shifts every day, introducing new ways to prevent careless errors is the best way to save lives.
Boop...
Boop...
Brrz!
"Benzadrine. Price check on Benzadrine."
*shudders*
Meta will eat itself
From what I read, the robots don't administer the injections.
Having been through chemo, I know that the first thing the nurse did each time was show me each of the syringes that were to be injected into my IV. Each was labelled with the medicine name and dosage.
I never saw the syringes being filled, but since I'm still alive, I trust that there's some degree of verification before I even saw the bag that contained all my chemo meds. For all I know, a robot could've mixed the meds, and I'd be none the wiser.
Take a look at your doctor's handwriting the next time you get a prescription. If you can't figure it out, your pharmacist probably can't either.
Human oversight is having sufficient presence of mind to ask your doctor "What drug am I being prescribed? At what dosage? In what form?", remembering the answer, and comparing what your doc told you with what's on your prescription... and with your pharmacist gives you after reading your prescription. In at least one recent study, around 6% of prescriptions result in errors.
In the absence of that oversight, I'll take my chances with the robot.
"Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery."
Telecoms usually have a clause for any business loss due network disruptions. I think that would apply here.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
People just don't like to trust machines. Some of this is for good reason, but all faults in machines lead back to human error. If humans incorrectly filled, say for example, 200 prescriptions a year and ended up killing 10 people it would be bad and maybe some people would get sued and some folks would lose their licenses. If a machine made one mistake in the course of years that resulted in a death, we'd have everyone up in arms talking about how this could have been prevented and that we're letting people die at the hands of evil machines and then we'd have a battery of laws passed against machines. Unfortunately this sense of losing control takes over people and fear kicks in, even if the machine is 100 times more accurate than a human at the same task.
blue screen of death
Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery
Yeah, and engineers might be held responsible if the bridges they design and build fail under normal/expected operating conditions.
Oh, that's right, I believe they are.
If the country gets hit with a tactical nuke, I think it's understood that shit happens. If some underpaid joe in Bumfuck, Idaho drives a piece of heavy machinery through the fiber conduit, I expect you to have a near-transparent failover. That's what engineering is about. It's about having the knowledge and experience to design and test well. That's why some people have objections to MCSE or RHCE certs using the word "engineer".
If you're providing the network service for my remote robotic surgery, you goddamn well better have a fault-tolerant re-routable network in place. And an on-call heart surgeon who can be there in minutes. Because if your negligence messes me up, you better believe that myself or my children will pay you a visit personally. We'll have a little chat and it will involve a butane torch and a ball peen hammer. That's a personal message from me to you, mister golden-parachute budget-cutting book-cooking CEO.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Well, I hope it's not for internal use. Can you imagine that thing crawing up your colon?
Oddly, I think some of you could. :-)
Aw, man, here comes another Troll/Offtopic mod. :(
--- Ban humanity.
Actually, no. Medical malpractice isn't even remotely like what a telecom would be liable for, no matter how badly they screwed up, unless they were actually practicing medicine. What they could be liable for in the above-stated situation is negligence, and frankly I don't have a problem with that. There's nothing exotic about high availablility networking these days.
This scenario also fails to take into account the fact that the link failing wouldn't be the end of the world. It's not like they just wheel the patient into the operating room and leave them there so the robot can go at it, and it's not like the robot will start wildly flailing about with scalpels and other sharp instruments just because it's no longer being told what to do. And lest we forget, the patient whose robot-surgeon has just stopped working is still all set up in an operating room, on an IV with people monitoring their vitals, in the midst of a well-equipped hospital. Not the end of the world at all.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
the rx robot develops a morphine habit and starts skimming off shots of pain killers to feed its own habit?
but seriously, is our nation's medical staff so incompetent/overworked that they can't even load a syringe properly? if so, removing this particular responsibility from their job will only give them more chances to cause potentially fatal blunders in other areas. i've heard so many horror stories about doctors and nurses collapsing patients' veins trying to administer IV medication that I'd almost trust myself more with a syringe than hospital staff. Maybe instead of paying for this $640k robot, they ought to invest more in better training for hospital staff.
Who better than to defend the robot surgeon than the RoboMouth 3000, the finest robot lawyer in production today? Why, the RoboMouth 3000 can file motions 63.7 times faster than the fastest human lawyer, and can should "Objection!" at 135db before opposing counsel finishes the offending remark!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
This is a deliberate setup.
They eat old people's medicine for fuel. And when they grab you in their metal claws, you can't escape because they're made of metal.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The electron ram stabbed out another searing blaze of light and took
out the appendix.
"How do you think I feel?" said Marvin bitterly.
"Just ran off and left you, did they?" the machine thundered.
"Yes," said Marvin.
"I think I'll shoot down their bloody ceiling as well!" raged the tank.
It took out the ceiling of the theatre.
"That's very impressive," murmured Marvin.
"You ain't seeing nothing yet," promised the machine, "I can take out
this floor too, no trouble!"
It took out the floor, too.
"Hell's bells!" the machine roared as it plummeted fifteen storeys and
smashed itself to bits on the ground below.
"What a depressingly stupid machine," said Marvin and trudged away.
(with apologies to Douglas...)
Anyone remember the episode wherein a teenage hacker hacks into a medial facility and changes their medical software so that people are given overdoses of insulin?
In the episode, the hacker was a teenager who was under the impression that the medical facility had blinded his father, and made the changes as a form of revenge.
In the real life version, I'm going to guess that we'll have people threatening to do something similar unless they're paid off.
Not that I'm against such changes. I just lost my Grandmother to a similar situation (someone gave her the wrong medicine as near as we can tell at this point), so any technology that can eliminate such errors, or help to reduce them, is welcomed by me and my family. I just think the Law & Order episode illustrates that no automated system's 100% foolproof. We still have to protect them from the script kiddies and such, but this is a huge step towards eliminating human errors, at least.
No, see, that's Germany. Only in Soviet Russia did patents sue you.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
So now with robotic surgery, both the doctor and the robot can liable for damages. Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery.
Yes, and that's as it should be: if you bring a product or service to market and it causes harm because it doesn't work as promised, you should be responsible for the damages.
So, if your robot causes unnecessary harm to patients or if your high-availability comlink goes down too much, then you should have to pay.