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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
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?"
Pedant (noun): a person who reads definitions to other people from the dictionary
"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"
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.
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).
Did you just read the headline, or only read the summary? Read the article maybe. The patient died the next day, the phone call was made apparently soon after getting the MRI results and the phone call was in the evening and the doctor had presumably gone home. So, wait until the next day to give an update to the patient, do a voice only call, or do a video call?
For me I'd rather get the news sooner that the condition was inoperable. More time to get other family notified. The real fault was that this was done without having an additional medical professional in the room at the time which was standard procedure for the hospital.
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.