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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
A remotely controlled machine is not a robot. The voice telling him he would die was the doctors. He spoke the truth. If you can't handle the truth of someone near death's fate stay out of hospitals. Life is cruel and a bitch, then you die.
I went to the doctor and he examined me and ran a battery of tests. His video link robot came back into the room and said, "Mr Ratzo, you're crazy." I told him I wanted a second opinion and he said, "You're ugly, too."
But the video link robot did suggest that I start doing yoga. When I asked him why, he said, "So you can kiss your ass goodbye."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Botside manner?
Ezekiel 23:20
I like the story immediately preceding this one is "Is Bad Customer Service More Profitable Than Good?"
Yes, I get that telling this to a patient is hard. But if you cannot do it in person, then do not be a doctor or do pathology were patients are already dead.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's Kaiser Permanente. What did you expect? Resources wasted seeing a patient in person, when they were going to quit paying fees in a few days anyway?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
First paragraph
Ernest Quintana's family knew he was dying of chronic lung disease when he was taken by ambulance to a hospital, unable to breathe.
And the headline reads "A California man learned he had only days to live from a doctor on robot video"
False headline since he already knew it. The video diagnosis is a little cold but honestly this is just people bitching.
Fuck the internet.
The article immediately preceding: "Is Bad Customer Service More Profitable Than Good?"
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I'm in my gown, backside sticking out, got into the position, doc did his bit, said I looked good, and left.
// actually told that joke to a friend who is a retired nurse
/// she didn't laugh, said that kind of thing happened all the time.
As the doc left the nurse came in and said "Who was that?"
/ here all week
What would have had to happen for the doctor to visit this patient in person? For instance, was he doing lift-saving surgery that afternoon in another hospital? Or just that he had many patients to make contact with in the short time between two other surgeries? There are many situations that would mean that this doctor could not have personally visited this patient.
So, what should the doctor have done? Not used the tech would mean not making contact with the patient at all. Had a nurse go see them, a nurse that can't give full information because they don't know the full situation and aren't a doctor? Or made the personal visits, which would mean not doing something else, like save someone's life in the theater?
Well, in this case, maybe the reaction of the patient means that not making contact at all would have been better. But I doubt all the other patients he talked with by video on that evening would have been happier with not seeing their doctor at all.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
"what's the bad news?" he asked the robot doctor.
"That number is in binary and I've been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday"
Just because we can do a thing, does not mean that we should do that thing. This is going to become more and more of an issue in the years to come.
Sounds like the bereaved family was looking for something to fuss about and latched on to this. Miserable people often do their best to make others miserable too. Good way to get the bill reduced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A Doctor Remotely Told A Patient He Was Going To Die Using A Video-Link Robot
So did he die using a video-link robot? Maybe someone should look into the safety of using those things.
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 grandkids probably didn't have as much trouble with that until they should. Some people these days claim to date by smart phone... only meeting rarely. Dumping by just disconnecting / ignoring sounds like a common thing too.
Communication tech doesn't seem to really be making people more connected on a human level. Technically they can send more data more often but it's hollow... I expect to hear more studies showing negative results as the younger generations continue to live in their bubbles. My generation lost the sense of community which died during the boomer era, but the next ones are losing more than that.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
How terrible for the doctor to do that. Much better to have told him to book an appointment to come in and get tests results thr next day...?
If you can't handle the truth of someone near death's fate stay out of hospitals.
Likewise, if you cannot be bothered to take the time to tell your dying patient the truth in person then don't be a doctor. The problem here is not that the patient can't handle the truth it's that the doctor either didn't care enough to tell his patient in person or was, himself, unable to handle a serious conversation like this.
This is the problem with Americans. They complain when the doctor won't give a 100% diagnosis. Then they complain when they do.
Had Mr. Quintana's insurance company been Humana, they would have just posted a comment on his Facebook page.
I just thought of that scene in the movie Elysium where the robot says, "and thank you for your service"
The fact that it was connected to a robot is just to make a clickbait headline.
Or used a phone call?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Your loved one is going to die.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Naw, they understand the situation and that time is a limited resource. You're just an asshole calling names.
I don't mind assholes in the general case, but you should really own your ideas more; worry about your own "high" if that is the root of the problem.
You'd rather some other patient get less care so that something that is routinely done over the phone could be done in person by the highest demand person available. I think that's disgusting. If you were in charge, you'd be a murderer with that directive.
"Mr Quintana died the next day."
Well at least he got that part of it right.
I'm only surprised that the robot didn't hand him a "How To Cope With Your Impending Death" pamphlet.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
No it is not a robot, does not meet the Oxford definition of one I posted. It is merely a remote controlled machine. Putting servos to control your car's rack and pinion steering rather than a direct mechanical connection doesn't make your car a robot either.
That was from the Oxford dictionary. Someone is a moron, and it's you.
Well, the doctor *did* speak to the patient in person earlier that day. I presume later when the doctor was at home he got the test results and decided to use the telepresence bot instead to get the news out more quickly rather than waiting a day (and the patient did die the next day).
OH, you're the same AC. You need to have a talk with your meth dealer, he seems to have sold you a cheap substitute.
This is slashdot. Everyone here is automatically an expert in all fields. We've got so much expertise that normally we can render a quality opinion based only on a headline. There's really not much reason to even hire scientists any more since any new scientific discovery will be shot down within minutes of appearing on slashdot.
Come on douche bag. Doctors need a life. They already work crazy hours and I presume he did it via video link becos it is off hours. People die in hospital all the time.
I see nothing wrong with Video link. As long as the message is delivered with sympathy and not with apathy.
E.g. I'm sorry to inform you like this but this is important and I feel you should know as soon as possible. You need to prepare for the worst in the next few days and spend as much time as possible with your loved ones.
Vs
Hey, your results are out.... you're gonna die in a few days. Bye.
So what WOULD have been the proper alternative here?
Disconnect the robot, take an hour to drive over while the patient waited and then tell her she was going to die in person? Somehow that doesn't sound all that good either.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Not relevant in this case -- Kaiser Permanente is an HMO. He was in a Kaiser hospital, with a Kaiser employee as his doctor -- it's one system.
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.
It's not even that. The guy died. This is his relatives complaining, not the patient.
Actually, I read the full article. You may have read a different article.
In any case, even the article seems to be contradicting itself. It shows a picture of the robot taken by the actual family, but in that picture, there is someone in blue with a stethoscope standing behind the robot. So the hospital seems to think that their policy was violated and they're apologizing for it, but based on the picture alone, that doesn't seem to really be the case.
So you may be right about "Their gripe is that the original doctor wasn't the one." It's just that you must have picked up this fact in a different article because that fact is not in the original BBC article referenced.
The problem isn't that the doctor used a video link to tell this guy he was going to die. The problem is the guy didn't have access to health care that would have told him he was seriously ill sooner than 24 hours before he was going to die.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You have no "right" to a familiar face telling you bad news.
I never said that you did have a right to this. When you go to a doctor you expect to have someone who cares about treating you. As such it is not at all unreasonable to expect your doctor to care enough to deliver serious news like this in person. This is clearly not medical malpractice it is a doctor being an arsehole much like someone who breaks up over text or email.
Yes, well it is rather hard to complain when you are dead.
So all that is needed to give the situation some humanity would be to have a nurse stand next to the robot and repeat what it says. It doesn't even need to be a nurse, it could easily be done by a desktop tech from IT who was in the area.
For some reason the term telefactor has never caught on. That's the correct name, if you don't want to just say computer screen, or video conference. (Did it have manipulators? Then it's a telefactor.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's worse when it's a 30 year old mother with leukemia and she has her 5 year old daughter on her lap. True story.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
... a screen inviting the patient to swipe a credit card?
tone
Yes, I get that telling this to a patient is hard. But if you cannot do it in person, then do not be a doctor or do pathology were patients are already dead.
The doctor could have just not told him. The test results don't say, "patient will die in 2-3 days". They say things like, platelet count is 17, white blood cells are 26, serum albumin is 78.3, arterial blood gas panel pending... et cetera. The doctor could just say, if it comes up after the patient drops dead, "it was a judgement call. I didn't tell him he'd be dead in two or three days because I didn't want to cause him to freak out over nothing when he could have lived for months or even years still... I wanted to run another test," (or get a consult with another doc, or 50 other things,) "to confirm before just dropping THAT kind of news on the guy," and covered his AND the hospital's asses, and we'd never even have heard about this. No story, no scandal, no lawsuit... nada.
ALSO... this is SLASHDOT! Why isn't everyone here all, "YAY!!! ROBOTS!!! SO FSCKING KEWL!!! WOOO!!!"
I, for one, WELCOME our new telling-patients-they're-going-to-die-robot overlords!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
And this is exactly why I bash Democrats who want to ban private health insurance and force all of us to go on shitty medicare.
You are confusing Medicare and Medicaid and the vastly different reimbursement rates and coverage that they offer. Nearly every doctor and hospital accepts Medicare; in fact, if Medicare was abolished a large number of hospitals and doctors would go out of business.
And the vast majority of actual doctors want Medicare for all, so there's that.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
At least he was diagnosed correctly.
Of SOCIALIZED Obamacare medicine. Take a pain pill and go home. You are elderly, a "drain" on the rest of our comrades.
No it is not a robot, does not meet the Oxford definition of one I posted.
Maybe you should try reading more than one line out of the dictionary.
> Or the doctor could have driven to the hospital and told them in person.
Or the doctor could simply stop reading email at night and then he wouldn't have known until the next day when the patient died anyways. Then it's god's fault, not his, not the hospitals nor the video robots.
I'd be a bit more concerned with the level of care rather than the method of delivering any bad medical news. One of the reasons (in theory) for telepresence is so that you can consult specialists nationally/internationally without them spending hours/days traveling for each patient when they could be lending their expertise to numerous patients in that same time period. I'm not sure if this specific situation fits that scenario, the specialist could live next door to the hospital for all i know, and even if he lived on the other side of the planet there are definitely ways to handle it a little better (having a generalist onsite to handle consults), but without knowing a bit more I'd cut the hospital a little slack.
...but he wasn't wrong tho
Car making arms work autonomously, no one remote controls them. They fit the definition of robot.
An average car is not a robot. It moves.