By Ian Ayres, a guest columnist on the New York Time’s Freakonomics blog:
“In Super Crunchers,
I conjectured that predictive analytics was going to invade physicians’
autonomy in the front-end job of making diagnoses — much as number
crunching has already done in the back-end job of choosing the best
treatment. But Every Patient Tells A Story [by Lisa
Sanders] convinces me that I missed the important and non-formulaic
role that good physicians will continue to play in acquiring and
analyzing the raw information needed before any formulaic algorithms
can be applied:
Medicine
— to the extent that it can be called a science — is a sensual science,
one in which we collect data about a patient through touch and the
other senses according to a systemic method in order to make a
diagnosis.“
Ian Ayres’ posts have an interesting perspective and I recommend reading them.
