Bias in the ER
<p><pre><code>  They hadn’t bothered to consider statistically far more likely causes of an irregular heartbeat. In Redelmeier’s experience, doctors did not think statistically.
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Statistics assumes independence, something that may be hard to come by in the ER. Even when you start factoring in the covariance between conditions, there&#x27;s so many confounding factors it&#x27;s probably difficult to tease out any sort of significant r^2 for an individual patient<p>Instead, I would advocate for a pattern recognition method. Given a database of x million patients, it&#x27;s likely someone has had the same type of case before, if not very similar. A sample would provide much less variable results than the individual patient,making diagnosis more confident.<p>Such a system could be used to predict symptoms before they become symptoms, saving time and preventing pain while serving to reduce hospital workload. Figure out a way to standardize it in the intake, and let the system predict what&#x27;s wrong. It&#x27;ll solve most of the cases, and identify new trends, leaving human doctors to focus on the edge cases like the one in the article.