alt Hacker News> 60% of evaluated AI Scribe systems mixed up prescribed drugs in patient notes, auditors say
Not mentioned, as far as I can see: the comparative human mistake rate.
Having seen a lot of medical records, 60% sounds about normal lol.
Replies
60% is a normal human mistake rate? You can't be serious.
60% is insanely high and absolutely not the performance of human mistake rate. What charts are you reading?
But who is responsible is different.
(And if you already see 60% error rates in standard, pre-AI note taking, how does that not translate into many deaths and injury? At least one country's health system in the world should have caught that)
This is not a popular view 'AI sucks at X but so do humans' but I think it is valid and we should take wins where we can, especially in healthcare. It is pretty clear that initial accuracy issues will become less and less of a problem as these technologies mature. This focus on accuracy now as a 'see it's bad' talking point though misses the real danger. Medical note takers have an exceptionally high chance of being hijacked for money and that is an issue we need to bring attention to now. They provide a real-time feed into a trillion dollar industry. Just roll that around in your head for a second. Insurance companies are going to want to tap that feed in real time so they can squeeze more money out. Drug makers are going to want to tap into that feed so they can abuse the data. Hospitals will want to tap into that feed to wring more out of doctors and boost the number of billable codes for each encounter. Very few entities are looking to tap into that feed to, you guessed it, help the patient. I am for these systems (and I have been involved in building them in the past) but the feeding frenzy of business interest that will obviously get involved with them is the thing we should be yelling and screaming about, not short-term accuracy issues.
Even if you had the same 60% error rate with humans the types of errors would be vastly different. Humans might make typos, or forget to include something, or even occasionally misremember some minor detail, but that's very different from BS AI just hallucinates out of nowhere. AI makes the kinds of mistakes no human ever would which means they can be extremely confusing and easy to catch or they can be something no human would even think to question or be looking out for because it makes no sense why AI would randomly (and confidently) say something so wrong.