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A Doctor Remotely Told A Patient He Was Going To Die Using A Video-Link Robot (bbc.com)
dryriver quotes the BBC: A doctor in California told a patient he was going to die using a robot with a video-link screen. Ernest Quintana, 78, was at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont when a doctor — appearing on the robot's screen — informed him that he would die within a few days. A family friend wrote on social media that it was "not the way to show value and compassion to a patient". The hospital says it "regrets falling short" of the family's expectations.
Mr Quintana died the next day.
Mr Quintana died the next day.
For years, here on /., there have been stories about how people use technology - I think the first time was Radio Shack laying off employees: https://slashdot.org/story/06/...
I guess that you can see why people use technology to avoid unpleasant situations, but they should be highlighted as being inappropriate with the message being that like a Stark, "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword."
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Maybe it was just pragmatism, not cowardice. The patient died the very next day. It's very possible that the patient was already in hospice care and that the doctor couldn't get to the patient in time to tell him the diagnosis in person.
In the case of my mother, the homecare hospice nurse is the one that told us that she only had three days left to live (based on the discoloration of her skin). And her prediction was remarkably accurate. She had been battling lung cancer for the last three years, so it's not like this came as a surprise to any of us. But the headsup from the nurse is what allowed my brother to fly in to see her one very last time.
This story is pure one-sided clickbait.
There's no way that this man, and his family, were not aware that his condition was critical. The doctor (who might have been hundreds of miles away) made the correct decision to inform the patient immediately of his prognosis.
Being there in person wouldn't have changed a thing. Quite the contrary - the patient very probably would have died waiting for the doctor to show up in person to tell him exactly what he and his family almost certainly already knew - that his life was about to end.
This is a story designed to make an insurance company look evil. There may be plenty of valid reasons to hate Kaiser Permanente, but this incident was not one of them. Note from the article: ""The evening video tele-visit was a follow-up to earlier physician visits." The family in fact did have previous personal consultations, where I'm sure they were told what to expect if the test results came out badly. The tele-visit was the doctor following up with them in as timely a manner as possible.
The fact that it was connected to a robot is just to make a clickbait headline.
So why not just phone call?
This basically was a phone call. Phones are used to deliver bad news all the time. Just because this phone was called a "robot" doesn't make it evil.