> A 26-year-old dental student in Connecticut died in an intensive care unit that was overseen by a remote "tele-health" doctor who pronounced him dead on a video screen after failing to "effectively communicate" his medical needs, a lawsuit says.
> Conor Hylton's parents are suing Yale New Haven Health, which owns and operates the Bridgeport Hospital Milford Campus where their son died in 2024, and Northeast Medical Group — which is also part of Yale New Haven Health — for negligence that they say ultimately led to his death.
This note in the article caught my eye, and I think I have that explanation:
> ”It also appears from the sparse ICU records that the ICU RN was only contacting the tele-ICU service for sedation orders as [their] condition deteriorated in the ICU”
It reads as though the on-site staff weren’t trained to detect and report conditions that are normally witnessed by the prescribing doctor. But. If this follows the same trends as our industry, this hospital’s innovative idea was to shift the workload of monitoring and reporting fully away from expensive doctors and onto cheaper nurses with oncall-remote escalation. The IT prodops equivalent here would be, perhaps, “the lower-cost engineer only reported a couple of sporadic latency spikes to the higher-cost oncall tech lead, who suggested checking swap and transaction logs and went back to other work, and a few hours the raid array died after losing a third drive”, and the post-mortem would look rather like what this article contains. We tolerate that sort of thing in tech when lives aren’t at stake — it’s just a raid array, after all! — but I think this hospital took it too far by cutting the oncall out of the ‘hands on’ loop and likely pressured the staff onsite to minimize costly escalations by making specific requests, probably through an app, bypassing the entire “a certified medical doctor occasionally puts eyeballs on the patient and their records as part of their rounds”. When the raid array fails, the junior eng is typically first to be blamed, for not reporting the symptoms with the context that a senior eng would have had, resulting in the senior eng not surveying the server’s condition.
So, then, if the remote-oncall medical senior ‘eng’ was not engaged to survey the patient’s full condition, and the ‘junior’ eng team was allowed to continue treating a patient without having done so, then the failure is the process, not the personnel: we would lose the raid array in this scenario, and they did lose the patient in this scenario. This process that I’m theorizing existed at the facility would guarantee an increase in deaths in exchange for a decrease in expenses. It’s easy to blame the nurses or the doctors, but as many ignored tech post-mortems would say:
“The data loss event ultimately stemmed from employment and process structures imposed by executives for cost savings, and we expect further incidents in the future. Specific mitigations were identified that should prevent this precise scenario, but ultimately the fault lies with department’s design, rather than with the engineers and their imperfect efforts. Additional headcount supporting a revised departmental five-year strategy would be necessary to cure the underlying process defects that allow incidents of this type to occur.”
Not sure about medical guidelines but for most stuff given to a patient wouldn't they need a doctor's prescription? The list of things that nurses and assistants can give to patients without a doctor's direction is pretty short I think?
Private equity gutting local hospitals and other healthcare silently create health deserts where the profits of their life flights to their for-profit tier 1 trauma centers far away are more important than healthcare outcomes like preventable and unnecessary deaths, disability, and bankruptcies.
This is what happens when corrupt, unempathetic, unregulated "capitalism" rapacious destruction and industrialized theft by a tiny cabal of psychopaths is allowed to capture government and great wealth at everyone else's expense. They would label Jesus "woke" and Adam Smith (given the real meanings of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations minus the superstitious mythological fetish of the "Invisible Hand") a "socialist".
> A 26-year-old dental student in Connecticut died in an intensive care unit that was overseen by a remote "tele-health" doctor who pronounced him dead on a video screen after failing to "effectively communicate" his medical needs, a lawsuit says.
> Conor Hylton's parents are suing Yale New Haven Health, which owns and operates the Bridgeport Hospital Milford Campus where their son died in 2024, and Northeast Medical Group — which is also part of Yale New Haven Health — for negligence that they say ultimately led to his death.
I wonder why they didn’t give him some ethanol or a benzodiazepine.
I’m no doctor but a 26 year old presenting with pancreatitis and dehydration is almost certainly an alcoholic, dude was probably wracked with DTs :(
> I wonder why they didn’t
This note in the article caught my eye, and I think I have that explanation:
> ”It also appears from the sparse ICU records that the ICU RN was only contacting the tele-ICU service for sedation orders as [their] condition deteriorated in the ICU”
It reads as though the on-site staff weren’t trained to detect and report conditions that are normally witnessed by the prescribing doctor. But. If this follows the same trends as our industry, this hospital’s innovative idea was to shift the workload of monitoring and reporting fully away from expensive doctors and onto cheaper nurses with oncall-remote escalation. The IT prodops equivalent here would be, perhaps, “the lower-cost engineer only reported a couple of sporadic latency spikes to the higher-cost oncall tech lead, who suggested checking swap and transaction logs and went back to other work, and a few hours the raid array died after losing a third drive”, and the post-mortem would look rather like what this article contains. We tolerate that sort of thing in tech when lives aren’t at stake — it’s just a raid array, after all! — but I think this hospital took it too far by cutting the oncall out of the ‘hands on’ loop and likely pressured the staff onsite to minimize costly escalations by making specific requests, probably through an app, bypassing the entire “a certified medical doctor occasionally puts eyeballs on the patient and their records as part of their rounds”. When the raid array fails, the junior eng is typically first to be blamed, for not reporting the symptoms with the context that a senior eng would have had, resulting in the senior eng not surveying the server’s condition.
So, then, if the remote-oncall medical senior ‘eng’ was not engaged to survey the patient’s full condition, and the ‘junior’ eng team was allowed to continue treating a patient without having done so, then the failure is the process, not the personnel: we would lose the raid array in this scenario, and they did lose the patient in this scenario. This process that I’m theorizing existed at the facility would guarantee an increase in deaths in exchange for a decrease in expenses. It’s easy to blame the nurses or the doctors, but as many ignored tech post-mortems would say:
“The data loss event ultimately stemmed from employment and process structures imposed by executives for cost savings, and we expect further incidents in the future. Specific mitigations were identified that should prevent this precise scenario, but ultimately the fault lies with department’s design, rather than with the engineers and their imperfect efforts. Additional headcount supporting a revised departmental five-year strategy would be necessary to cure the underlying process defects that allow incidents of this type to occur.”
Not sure about medical guidelines but for most stuff given to a patient wouldn't they need a doctor's prescription? The list of things that nurses and assistants can give to patients without a doctor's direction is pretty short I think?
A remote doctor can prescribe.
Private equity gutting local hospitals and other healthcare silently create health deserts where the profits of their life flights to their for-profit tier 1 trauma centers far away are more important than healthcare outcomes like preventable and unnecessary deaths, disability, and bankruptcies.
This is what happens when corrupt, unempathetic, unregulated "capitalism" rapacious destruction and industrialized theft by a tiny cabal of psychopaths is allowed to capture government and great wealth at everyone else's expense. They would label Jesus "woke" and Adam Smith (given the real meanings of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations minus the superstitious mythological fetish of the "Invisible Hand") a "socialist".
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