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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gg cox who wrote (138887)	2/3/2018 2:44:35 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 218543

Long, long overdue applying AI to medicine doing things like "reading" scans and systems which make the information in medical records continuously available providing benefits that the information can't when it's locked-up in old records storage. There's a huge incentive to reduce the cost of delivering health maintenance and medical care and a lush amount of costs which can be eliminated or significantly reduced. It's a part of the economy which is only beginning to be "rationalized". But as societies become wealthier, the percentage of their income they spend on things like medicine, leisure activities and fitness will always rise because they can afford more of it - and technology has made more things available and available at less cost. It's this second part in medicine, available at a lower cost, which needs a lot more attention. In the early 1900s my great-grandmother and her three children traveled the world in First Class passage on steamships and trains and they learned languages and skills in the process, something which was possible for well less than 1% of the population. By reducing the costs aircraft with jet engines has made this possible for a huge percentage of citizens in industrialized nations, and they have more income to spend. We all know how much more luxurious a holiday can be in a lower cost region of the world, or when your currency is temporarily strong relative to the currency where you're visiting. You can easily enjoy a style of living which would be very costly in your home city. With changing technology, if travelers still faced the costs of First Class steamship travel in 1910, we'd still travel more, but far, far less than we do given than we have both more income AND greatly reduced costs of travel. We've experienced the same technological change in medicine but the cost structure hasn't changed with far too much going to rentier costs due to a lack of competition.

To: gg cox who wrote (138887)	2/3/2018 2:44:49 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 218543

The fact that the Republican Congress prohibited Medicare from seeking competitive bids on pharmaceuticals when George W. Bush added pharmaceutical coverage to Medicare is madness owing to the fact that the US government can too easily be owned with political donations from entities like pharmaceutical companies. Perhaps a tiny percentage of Americans may be proud of the fact that we pay more than twice as much for medications than other industrialized nations, but I don't care much about their feelings. Paying the lower amounts paid by other nations gives us more healthcare at less cost. The alternate way of reducing travel and healthcare costs is to go back to the viewpoint of 1910 and say it's something which should only be easily available to the wealthiest people who make up far less than 1% of the population. Most of our greatly reduced travel costs are dependent upon the fact that everyone can afford it so the costs are distributed over a huge number of people. It's the same with medicine. Make most healthcare available to a minority of the population and the cost per person rises dramatically. Make it reliably available to everyone and the overhead costs are amortized over a large number of people.

To: gg cox who wrote (138887)	2/3/2018 3:04:43 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 218543

It's interesting seeing these changes in delivering medical care over the past ten years. We've switched to a Doctor who at the age of 42 is a couple of decades younger than I rather than my age. Something which was inevitable at some point. But although he's much younger he's perhaps far more adverse to technology than my older Doctors. He sensibly wanted my medical history stretching back 30 years but was flummoxed that I could provide him with most of it in an Excel spreadsheet. He's used to reviewing paper records sent from prior Doctors, many of whom have retired. Legally these records are available to him, unless the prior Doctor is dead, but at a huge cost or in an abbreviated inaccurately remembered fashion in talking with me or my prior Doctors. I've told him repeatedly that when I remember events and the sequence of events differently from my spreadsheets, I'm wrong, because that's the way memory is. With a combination of some prior paper records and my spreadsheet he became convinced I transcribed the data correctly but most of delivering 30 years of information to him in a form which tells him something useful is still up to me because it's my system and Excel is second nature to me. A couple of months ago he got fed up with the service which allowed him to prescribe medications on a tablet and relay them to the pharmacy because: it required him to more of the clerical work the pharmacist used to do and secondly because he has to pay a subscription fee each month for the "service". The cost of this the electronic pharmaceutical system and electronic records is paid for Doctors who work for a larger institution and they don't have the choice to opt out of it. He still has a choice so he's gone retro - but that will change.