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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.
"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"
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.
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...?
Had Mr. Quintana's insurance company been Humana, they would have just posted a comment on his Facebook page.
The fact that it was connected to a robot is just to make a clickbait headline.
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.
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).
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.
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.