Will the Computer Replace the Urgent Care Physician?

I wonder if every medical student wonders if someone could simply put all the symptoms of a patient into a computer, and the computer would generate the most likely diagnosis. Could the computer even use artificial intelligence and become a better and better diagnostician. Well that future may be a somewhat distant dream, but EasyDiagnosis.com is a website that may be offers some promise to help a patient discover some diagnostic alternatives for their sympton cluster and give the patient a rough statistical probability for each suggested differential diagnosis.

EasyDiagnosis.com allows patients to input age and sex and then guides them through a list of historical information to help determine the chances of specific diagnoses. The sample template on their website was for back pain. I answered the questions to indicate (among other items) I was a fifty-year-old male and that I was suffering sciatica and weight loss. The program determined my diagnostic probabilities as:

• 73% Tumor

• 17% Spinal Stenosis

• 9.4% Herniated Lumbosacral Disc

• 0.1% Chronic Low Back Syndrome

• 0.1% Osteoporosis

• 0.1% Osteomyelitis

• 0.1% Depression

• 0.1% Chronic Arthritis

• 0.1% Acute Lumbar Strain

• 0.1% Miscellaneous

Not really that bad. It's not quite ready to replace the physician, but it may help patients find the correct care for their medical problem. Allowing programs like this to interact with patients and physicians is definitely the future of medicine, allowing patient to input their symptoms and triage themselves in the waiting room of the urgent care center. Certain symptom constellations could even be used to expedite care of patients who need it. Allowing patients to do this from home may even allow patients to be directed to an urgent care center or to a hospital emergency department. Allowing computers to improve the care of patients in the urgent care center is the goal of Practice Velocity Software Solutions, and Practice Velocity will continue to bring innovative computer solutions to improve the efficiency and care of your urgent care center.

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Urgent Care Fall Mini-Conference: Coding & Startup Tracks (Phoenix, AZ--October 6-7)

Join us at the first annual Urgent Care Association Fall Mini-Conference in Phoenix, AZ at the beautiful Pointe South Mountain Resort on October 6-7, 2006. This should be an intimate conference with excellent opportunities for networking with the faculty. Expected attendance is about fifty urgent care professionals.

Conference registration is still open, but vendor booths are completely sold out. There will be two tracks:

• How to start an urgent care center: Join me for a talk and discussion of basics of managed care contracting. The track includes tours of two different urgent care centers in the Phoenix area. This appears to be the most extensive course ever offered on starting an urgent care center.
• Advanced coding in urgent care: I will be speaking on specialized codes in urgent care and on negotiating problem-based evaluation and management (E/M) coding. Coders, administrators and physicians will all benefit from gaining this knowledge.

My partner John Koehler and I will, also, be speaking at the National Association of Occupational Healthcare Professionals (NAOHP) in Philadelphia on October 23-25. Ryan Associates have requested that we speak on the topic, Benefits and Challenges of the Mixed-Use (occupational medicine and walk-in care) Clinic. Be sure to introduce yourself at the Practice Velocity booth.