What he found was that his patients opted for radical treatments, such as surgery or chemotherapy, that resulted in side-effects that actually ended up being more harmful. To use a cliche, the cure was worse than the cancer.
For such patients, "the medical consensus is that active surveillance often is the appropriate treatment for small early tumors". Of course, such an approach is not risk-free, but the problem is that "despite the data showing that this approach is safe, about 50% of eligible men don’t get it either because they turn it down or their physicians don’t embrace it. Medical experts say many men have been overtreated, as their cancers probably posed little immediate danger."
What was his solution?
Negotiate with patients.
As noted in the WSJ article referenced above, he contacted Harvard professor Deepak Malhotra who had authored an article on the topic to develop strategies on negotiating with the patient. Leveraging lessons from behavioral economics was to make monitoring the anchor instead of surgery or chemo. Dr. Ehdaie and professor Malhotra devised a lecture that was delivered to doctors to help them learn from Dr. Ehdaie's successes with this approach.
But what does this have to do with limits of robot-professionals or robopros?
When it comes to cancer treatment and robots, one can't complete the conversation without mentioning IBM's Watson "Oncology Edition". In fact, IBM has a partnership with the same Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that Dr. Ehdaie works at. Here is a promo-video that speaks to the promise of Watson:
As noted in the WSJ article referenced above, he contacted Harvard professor Deepak Malhotra who had authored an article on the topic to develop strategies on negotiating with the patient. Leveraging lessons from behavioral economics was to make monitoring the anchor instead of surgery or chemo. Dr. Ehdaie and professor Malhotra devised a lecture that was delivered to doctors to help them learn from Dr. Ehdaie's successes with this approach.
But what does this have to do with limits of robot-professionals or robopros?
When it comes to cancer treatment and robots, one can't complete the conversation without mentioning IBM's Watson "Oncology Edition". In fact, IBM has a partnership with the same Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that Dr. Ehdaie works at. Here is a promo-video that speaks to the promise of Watson:
The key to understanding the limits to robot-professionals is the backstory on how Dr. Ehdaie first decided to explore negotiations a way to deal with the issue.
This is where serendipity comes to play.
He was exposed to such concepts with discussions with his wife who is an MBA. Meaning that he went beyond the cancer treatment journals and then discovered a non-standard approach to dealing with a problem. Robots are not good at this. Machine-learning and AI is only good as what you teach it. Even "simple" tasks require thousands of man-hours to train such algos. Perhaps this can be overcome, but currently, it is a real limitation of AI.
Does this make humans indispensable?
Really depends on the objectives that govern the profession and the organizations that hire them.
If it's about cost-cutting and making the process efficient and streamlined, robots are perfect creating a fossilized bureaucracy that is resistant to change. Think about how financial institutions have yet to overhaul their ancient banking systems coded in COBOL:
"In the United States, the financial sector, major corporations, and parts of the federal government still largely rely on it because it underpins powerful systems that were built in the 70s or 80s and never fully replaced."
Similarly, if Dr. Watson replaces a large component of the diagnostic process it would become hard to dislodge it from the cancer treatment process.
On the other hand, if organizations recognize the value of human beings in being important to overall objectives of the profession - patient care, audit quality, etc. - then human judgment must be hardwired into the organization's DNA to avoid the development of such an inflexible system.
If it's about cost-cutting and making the process efficient and streamlined, robots are perfect creating a fossilized bureaucracy that is resistant to change. Think about how financial institutions have yet to overhaul their ancient banking systems coded in COBOL:
"In the United States, the financial sector, major corporations, and parts of the federal government still largely rely on it because it underpins powerful systems that were built in the 70s or 80s and never fully replaced."
Similarly, if Dr. Watson replaces a large component of the diagnostic process it would become hard to dislodge it from the cancer treatment process.
On the other hand, if organizations recognize the value of human beings in being important to overall objectives of the profession - patient care, audit quality, etc. - then human judgment must be hardwired into the organization's DNA to avoid the development of such an inflexible system.
Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else
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