Holding Tech Giants Accountable in Healthcare: Dr. Andrew Miller Calls for Stronger Regulations after Crowdstrike Mayhem

Here is the transcript of Dr Andrew Miller’s weekly medical and news commentary during WAMN News’ Sunday broadcast.

Thanks for your time. One of the things that I’m really interested in healthcare is who takes responsibility.

“Who takes responsibility for ensuring that there are professional standards and for ensuring that if anything does go wrong, that the systems are rectified so that it doesn’t occur again.

“Now, the other day we saw global enterprise and travel brought to its knees when the CroudStrike software, which is part of the Windows security system, caused the Microsoft screen of death to appear where we don’t want to see it, including inside healthcare institutions that run electronic medical records.

“Now, when a doctor makes a mistake, quite rightly, we perform a close investigation to figure out what went wrong, partly with an eye to being able to give people an explanation as to what happened with them, and also to learn from it so that it doesn’t happen again.

“Nobody really gets to choose these days when it comes to technology.

“Technology moves ahead under its own steam and the companies that bring it to us make an awful lot of money out of introducing these tools that will be adopted.

“Essentially that’s the way humans work. take on the latest thing and as we move into artificial intelligence, this is all going to accelerate because the tools used to develop new software will become In some senses automated so that things will start happening quicker and quicker.

“What we need to do is make sure that our leaders hold the companies responsible, make sure that they can’t wriggle out so that if we have artificial intelligence assisting within healthcare and in other spaces as well, but my interest, particularly in healthcare , in making diagnostic, systems decisions in making decisions about patients, we have to know who’s going to be responsible then.

“It shouldn’t be the doctor and the patient who are left holding the can when there is an issue with what’s been recommended, for example, by artificial intelligence.

“We still need to be able to fall back on the old fashioned ways of doing things so that if electronic medical records are not available, we need reliable systems in place in critical care applications.

“And so that will include things like being able to write stuff down with pen and paper and have that included in the record somewhere.

“Whilst I’m all for technological improvement, very keen adopter of anything that’s available that can assist us to do things better and do things more efficiently so we can get a better bang for the healthcare dollar.

“I also want to see these companies that make big amounts of money out of all of this held responsible.

“We don’t have a good track record on that.

“If we look at social media at the moment, we know that there’s a lot of money being made through advertising on those.

“But there’s not a lot of responsibility being taken for some of the content on there which just should not be on there.

“So to equip ourselves better for the future, we need leaders who are going to be prepared to stand up to these companies, all of them, and put in place really good, strong regulation and controls and systems to make sure that they are as responsible as all of the humans who are in healthcare dealing with patients every day. Thanks so much for your time.”