Google Glass for Us, Not Them! We Need Them More.

The medical industry may be dangerous to your health.

Medical errors leading to patient death are much higher than previously thought, and may be as high as 400,000 deaths a year, according to a  study in the Journal of Patient Safety.

If  you dodge the bullets of heart disease and cancer you are poised for the third: your  doctor or hospital.  (Remember the one you said, “I got the best. All the doctors send their family to him. Only the best.”   I grew up in that rarefied atmosphere of Ivy med and ego stroking.  These mythical doctors know they are on shaky pedestals even if you don’t.)

This is context, let’s move on because we found a company that wants to make it easier for the third leading cause of death to maintain their operational advantage in wiping you out.  If you KNOW a lethal object is in a room or a deadly interaction with a killer might take place, would you hand the cause an easy way to obscure their actions? Of course not. If offered protection would you take it? Of course.

So why is Augmedix being given VC big bucks to help the the third leading cause of death at your expense?  Because they pitched it well?   Probably.   San Francisco based med tech start up Augmedix recently received  3.2 million in funding to rehumanize medicine.  How do they plan to accomplish this? By inserting yet more barriers between a person and a health care provider.  Google glass for doctors!  REALLY???  This is going to RE-humanize the medical industry?  Improve the relationship between people and MD’s? The inequality doesn’t jump out at you, reader?

I’ve watched their videos, read their site, seen their angel list video and other than giving the doctor more money (Augmedix says this, not me. It gives the doctor more patients to see in a day), I can’t figure out what the hell this is all about.  Ok, the electronic records thing – yes, it’s a horror. So now we have a horror to the nth degree to fix this horror.

The doctor is going to video the consult? Look up drugs? When I get handed Google glass by the gatekeepers, then we begin to re-humanize this interaction. And when the doctor’s Glass is less important than mine, we might be on a path to something real.

I’m horrified at the paternalism taken to the next level. The white coat syndrome is a serious enough problem and giving Google glass to ONLY one half of the equation here is more of the same, RECORDED. Does the person being recorded get the video sent to them? Where is MY GOOGLE GLASS? And I will decide if any other person will wear it in a medical office, not them. We have lost our collective minds and handed them over to the medical industry to highjack, brainwash and manipulate.  Oy.