[HN Gopher] GPT-4 will hunt for trends in medical records thanks...
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       GPT-4 will hunt for trends in medical records thanks to Microsoft
       and Epic
        
       Author : samizdis
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2023-04-18 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
        
       | just_steve_h wrote:
       | Gee, I'm so glad that I "opted in" to have my private medical
       | data used for corporate research!
       | 
       | How did I "opt in"? My healthcare provider migrated to Epic for
       | all medical records. I had the "choice" of... not receiving
       | healthcare, I guess? But even then, all my past records were
       | imported to Epic anyway.
       | 
       | And before you "market choice" folks start squawking: your
       | provider changing their records system is not a "qualifying
       | event," so you don't get to shop for another provider until the
       | next enrollment period. Also, ALL of the providers available to
       | me use Epic.
        
       | avereveard wrote:
       | Poor IBM Watson, killed by not being hip
        
         | unsupp0rted wrote:
         | Having GPT-4 play Jeopardy today would be no fun at all
        
           | Arrath wrote:
           | You might be able to make a drinking game on when it forgets
           | to phrase the response as a question.
        
         | civilized wrote:
         | If Watson had been good at anything but Jeopardy, IBM would
         | have spent billions making sure we all knew.
        
       | unsupp0rted wrote:
       | Is anybody currently feeding a country's worth (e.g. Israel) of
       | medical records into an AI and asking it to come up with novel
       | off-label uses of medicine?
       | 
       | E.g. "TDAP Tetanus vaccine = 42% lower risk of dementia in older
       | adults"... more findings like this would be great.
       | 
       | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33856020/
        
         | sigmar wrote:
         | >Several vaccine types are linked to decreased dementia risk,
         | suggesting that these associations are due to nonspecific
         | effects on inflammation rather than vaccine-induced pathogen-
         | specific protective effects.
         | 
         | Doesn't this make it sound like there's a confounding factor?
         | Such as: vaccines are more common in people that are wealthier
         | or people that choose to align their lifestyles with
         | recommendations from doctors?
        
         | kjs3 wrote:
         | In my dark little heart of hearts, I know there's some US
         | insurance company executives sitting around thinking "how can I
         | use machine learning to automate the process of denying
         | coverage based on 'trends' or whatever that I won't have to
         | justify because I'm not obligated to make the LLMs decision
         | process transparent to anyone".
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | I've been very much against regulation of AI at all.
       | 
       | But now that you're talking drawing inferences from medical
       | data...... it's making me pause to think.
        
         | worldsayshi wrote:
         | At some point there needs to be a comprehensive way to allow
         | individuals to make decisions about how their data should be
         | handled. Allow me to decide how my medical records should be
         | handled in the same way that I can manage whether my location
         | data should be shared with the app I'm currently using. Allow
         | me to revoke consent and set up general rules. Don't make me
         | repeat myself unless there's a good reason. Make a system I can
         | trust.
         | 
         | I think it could be done in the EU at least. If we up the it
         | competence level of our decision makers a couple of notches.
        
           | Semino wrote:
           | I hope not.
           | 
           | It's time we start finding cures for illnesses like mine
           | which doesn't has medication.
           | 
           | It's time to use big data and ml on as much data possible to
           | start helping much more people faster.
           | 
           | Every CRT every diagnosis helps.
           | 
           | Feel free to advocate for proper anonmysation if the data but
           | not for the use of it.
        
       | kazinator wrote:
       | GPT-4 or its successors, will kill medical records as such.
       | 
       | And it will be like shooting fish in a barrel.
       | 
       | It is said that doctors spend a lot of their time on bullshit
       | computer procedures, involving garbage software, when they should
       | be seeing patients or learning something.
        
         | debesyla wrote:
         | I doubt that anything can kill BS medical records. Two reasons
         | that I see:
         | 
         | 1) privacy and other laws have high demand of "structured" and
         | "secure" information keeping ("it's a law that I must fill this
         | information into this BS table and it's 100 BS fields");
         | 
         | 2) governments love to spend the money on "standalone" software
         | that has 1000 BS requirements... And contact companies do love
         | to make that software as BS as they can because the worse
         | system it is, the more additional contracts do they get to
         | solve the problems they made.
         | 
         | Basically, I am sceptical that anything could help medical
         | staff. (I am pessimistic because of what I see in my country of
         | Lithuania. Barely working proprietary systems ("e-sveikata" and
         | "e-receptai") that costs tax payers hundreds of millions
         | Euros.)
        
         | worldsayshi wrote:
         | > will kill medical records as such
         | 
         | Why do you think so?
         | 
         | I see a huge thorny ball of legal issues that needs to be
         | resolved before gpt-like services can really become useful...
         | 
         | I personally feel very held back by legal (and infosec)
         | uncertainty. I would use chatgpt a lot more of it didn't feel
         | so legally sticky (?).
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | From Microsoft's pov there's basically no infosec issues.
           | They're running their own copies of GPT inside their airlock.
           | It's no different than any other analysis they do on behalf
           | of their customers.
           | 
           | To everyone else it's turning data over to a 3rd party but
           | for them it's like running scapy.
           | 
           | They can't train on one customer's data and use it on another
           | but that's less of an issue than you'd think.
        
       | astrange wrote:
       | Hmm, how does a language model "search for trends"?
        
         | yeck wrote:
         | Doesn't understanding language require that a model understands
         | trends in the features of text embeddings inputted into it? And
         | haven't we found that the more text and transformers the
         | complex the trends it can understand in that text? If you have
         | enough features present in medical records, why wouldn't it be
         | able to find trends?
        
           | astrange wrote:
           | Because 1. it has a limited context window, so it has no
           | permanent memory 2. you can't fine-tune ChatGPT/GPT-4 to get
           | around this, and of course 3. language models don't do
           | anything by themselves unless you input text into them.
        
         | og_kalu wrote:
         | By inferring connections in data pasted into its context
         | window. Except its context can be as much as 50 pages at a time
         | and semantic search means you can paste relevant context
         | related to any query buried in mountains of data into context
         | automatically.
         | 
         | Pages and pages of text that can't be read by any one person
         | can be parsed in seconds by a machine with enough knowledge and
         | understanding to make something meaningful of it.
         | 
         | The same idea is already being applied for law -
         | https://twitter.com/ai__pub/status/1644735555752853504
        
       | Semino wrote:
       | Good.
       | 
       | Can't wait for more people getting help.
       | 
       | Alone a system which knows all patients with my sickness (RLS)
       | could potentially show something when clustering 100ktens of
       | diagnosises
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-18 23:02 UTC)