Software as an assistant to physicians

Neurodudes has an excellent article on software intended to reduce medical errors.

Just from my limited personal experience, I would say that such software would be useful if people understand that it is limited in scope. There are three general reasons I think that software is useful in medicine:

Standardization. There are many diseases for which there are clear standards of care. For example, chest pain has a very straightforward heuristic that we follow in diagnosing a patient, and for each possible diagnosis there is a clear set of treatments. In areas for which there is not a lot of wiggle room, software can help bring relatively consistent care to 100% consistent care.

Clear records. Software can help in record keeping. When you actually have to type out or punch in physical diagnosis and lab values into software -- and thus have those become part of the patient's record -- you remove all the gaming that happens when attendings deliberately have poor handwriting or omit observations to avoid liability. (You would think that in this day in age this wouldn't be a problem, but I have had attendings tell me that this why they have bad handwriting. In many cases it is totally unreadable.)

Rare diagnoses. Software can be useful in reminding physicians of diagnoses that may be rare, but still need to be ruled out. A lot of the time chest pain is a heart attack, but some of the time it is something really, really weird. Good physicians rule out the rare even if they don't think they will ever see it.

People need to understand, however, that perfection in medicine is not possible. In a system where everything is a donkey until it is a zebra, where only a subset if any of the symptoms are present with a lot of unrelated nonsense just to distract, where the individuals that you are relying on for a history has no idea what is important and what isn't, error is inevitable. Software is helpful and should be embraced, but it should be embraced with an awareness that there is a reason people spend their entire lives trying to be good doctors: it is a lot harder than it looks.