Should Medical Apps Be Regulated?

Because regulation artificially narrows the supply

And artificially strips out dangerous or faulty procedures, chemicals etc. before they experience the joys of the free market on the public who have to enjoy the burdens of what's happening. Because your medical information is *private* and letting anyone have at your private medical information without any regulation means that information could be used against you.

Because letting people take random chemicals to see if some of them cure whatever disease they have definitely isn't a good idea, but it's cheap, so we could do that.

It does however depend a lot on what apps actually do. I'm not sure you need to highly regulate the applications used by medical professionals to handle payroll or scheduling or room booking. There are custom software packages for a lot of those because all hospitals face similar problems and so on, so it makes sense then to not have to completely re-engineer your payroll system just because your hospital is not the hospital one block over. But if you're talking about tracking a patient's blood sugar and providing advice based on that tracking you're into a whole collection of privacy rules (how secure is this data? Who am I sending the data to?) and providing medical advice from something that isn't a medical professional.

Which tends to show they're talking past each other a bit. The one doctor is making an app to deal with strokes, that's almost certainly into the category of medical advice (at least potential medical advice) and tracking a lot of deeply private medical information. The other guy is helping doctors communicate information between rounds, so there are privacy implications, but he's not necessarily intending that information to ever actually see a patient.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/oZVZxWeF77A/should-medical-apps-be-regulated

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