A good question worth considering, IMO. Take the Susan G. Komen Foundation as a present-day example of a foundation that, although founded with a righteous cause in mind, has (in some folks' estimation) lost its way, and/or become a somewhat negative force on cancer treatment, women's health, and charity efforts generally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Co...
Of course for a foundation that relies heavily on continuing donations, the "market" (so to speak, in this case arranged for the generation of social good) can send a corrective signal by cutting donations. For a completely self-sustaining trust, it stands to reason that society would have little chance to "fix" a wayward organization.
You've not refuted the article so much as pointed out a corner case the author didn't address in which ML is a good fit. Your example, using ML to perform the medical coding function, is using a data source (in this case the EMR) for one of the purposes for which it was explicitly designed and for which it is (arguably) non-deficient. That is a realm not doomed to failure.
The realm doomed to failure is using a data source for a completely oblique purpose for which it is horribly distorted. Namely, the purpose of optimizing individual and public health by discovering guidelines and treatments, diagnosing illness, and delivering optimal care.
(Of course medical billing as an enterprise shouldn't even exist, but that is another topic.)
I wish the first thread I saw was this enthusiastic about Brother. I've got an HP delivering today because it sounded like the Linux driver support was more solid -- didn't see a mention of this proprietary cartridges nonsense. Mea culpa for not doing more research I guess.
Worth noting that the author makes a significant claim without any citation:
> That vaping works as a way to quit smoking... seems clear.
Studies have been fairly limited so far, given the recency of e-cigarettes (relative to science's timescale). And the studies that we have seem pretty mixed: some showing benefit over other accepted smoking cessation methods, some not. Some showing higher relapse rates in the e-cigarette group. Nothing about that seems clear to me.
> You know someone somewhere got a can of creamed corn.
But the point was you don't know that. If they get deluged with creamed corn, it might just sit in a warehouse, get shipped to a different community, or even get trashed. Donate a can if you prefer, just don't fool yourself with false guarantees.
I would argue that even the ideal medical system would likely produce the same outcomes experienced by the author of the parent post. In our present stage of scientific and technological advancement, the following might as well be a Law of Nature: even the best of drugs will have varying effects on various people in varying circumstances.
But yes, there are plenty of inadequacies in our healthcare industry (speaking from the US), but that's a much, much broader discussion.
Forgive me for being blunt, but that's just how modern medicine works. No one has the Star Trek tricorder that can scan your body, read your genome, and detect a quantum fluctuation in your synaptic waveform matriculation to calculate how many CCs to put in the hypospray.
We really only have one amazing piece of technology at our disposal: statistics. At the absolute best (and I'm not saying it's always the best...), what comes out of a pharmaceutical development pipeline is a drug that works for some people some of the time. Sure, sometimes you get broad categories to try to narrow down effectiveness, but at the individual level there is ultimately no choice but to try a drug and see if it works. And this is especially true in psych drugs, in no small part because there are so many unanswered questions about how our mind works.
And that sucks. I get it. It must be so frustrating to deal with a revolving door of new regimens and new side effects, all while yearning for relief from the underlying ailment. Not to mention navigating our nightmarish medical bureaucracy. But please understand that doctors, generally, are just doing their best to help given the tools they have. If you don't currently have that kind of trust and partnership with your doctor, I hope you are able to find one with which you can. I wish you the best, and hope that this perspective will make your frustrations somewhat easier to bear.
And don't forget the related metric: "number needed to harm". Physicians practicing good, Evidence-Based Medicine also weigh how many patients are likely to be impacted by harmful side effects.
No benefits were identified to PSA screening, while 1 in 5 will go on to have an unnecessary prostate biopsy (which can itself lead to complications, false-positive diagnosis, and further treatment with associated complications, and so on).
(I feel obliged to mention that I'm not a doctor, btw, just sort of a casual fan of medical science and stats.)
In addition to tibbett's point (expressing technical accomplishments in terms of their value to the business), do some honest introspection on your value to your peers. I'm really just elaborating on Ms. Botros' article here, but for example you want to ask yourself these kinds of questions:
Do you improve the skills of the people around you? Do you identify and help resolve barriers faced by your peers? (This doesn't always mean fixing things yourself!) Do you improve the environment and culture where you work? Can you work collaboratively to establish a vision for change? How do you gain the buy-in of your peers when it comes time to implement change?
Internalizing these answers will prepare you to steer the conversation onto the skills that you know are important for the role.
I would argue that company-specific historical knowledge is not the value you (et al) are bringing. The value is the soft-skills of effective leadership that distinguish Principal from Senior (to use the article's parlance). Successfully transferring this to another company is an exercise in knowing how to demonstrate and sell those skills. And, of course, in finding a company and an interview panel that understands their value.
Anyone worth their salt should realize that the long-term value of technical leadership far eclipses the short-term value of knowing what happened that one time we tried switching from Technology A to Technology B. (And unless you've completely purged your engineering department, such institutional knowledge is there to be queried.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...