Tuesday, May 5, 2015

A New Malpractice Opportunity?

It appears that IBM will joining with an EMR entity to join their Watson diagnostic capabilities to the EMR.

As Becker's reports:

Epic plans to embed Waton's cognitive computing capabilities into its EHR using open standards, which will then allow patient data to be pulled from health records and delivered to Watson. The supercomputer will then analyze that data in comparison to its massive volumes of stored clinical data and produce medical literature and case studies most relevant to that patient's care to help inform clinical decisions in real time.

Now just think if you are a physician using this system and it "suggests" an alternative diagnosis or procedure and you over-ride it, then through discovery you may be found negligent, or IBM is brought into a claim for practicing without a license.

This is one of those nice ideas that sounded good when they first thought through it. It may not sound so great after a few trials.

One wonders if this is Press Release driven. Imagine suing the HAL 9000 or it cousin!