How to save lives in developing countries | Ziad Obermeyer | TEDxHarvardCollege

What are the top three causes of death for Harvard graduates? As it turns out, mental illness, extreme sports, and car accidents while traveling in developing countries. Ziad Obermeyer, an emergency physician, discusses how applying best practices in the emergency room in developing countries can drastically improve health outcomes--for locals and for visitors.
Ziad Obermeyer's research applies traditional statistics and machine learning to study high-stakes clinical decisions: emergency diagnosis and treatment, predicting mortality, and end-of-life care. He is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a practicing emergency physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at ted.com/tedx

[@BroadcaststoNowhere]

Well intentioned superficial discussion of a man and his job. I have been in all this individuals professional environments and very little was shared describing "how to save lives in developing countries". In summary he said, paraphrasing "we have a good system here and they need it too".
Developed countries have administrative and capitalistic control problems regarding medical care, while emerging countries have an infrastructural resource control problem. Simply adding our problems on top of their system would not improve outcomes. It is also very unlikely as our system requires tremendous financial resources to fund such inefficiencies. Third world countries do not have these financial resources and thus would never attract our system in the first place.
What I was hoping to hear discussed was how to solve these infrastructural resource control problems from afar or virtually. Failing that I was hoping for innovative means to improve our own systemic inefficiencies. Sadly, neither was discussed.
What I find after nearly 30 years of medical / healthcare related experience is incumbents are typically blind to the larger geopolitical / capitalistic / first principle causes of resource delivery inefficiencies both at home and abroad. Those faint glimmers that do penetrate are quickly extinguished by incumbent professional protectionism.
The ultimate truth is outcomes reflect the inputs and so long as capitalism is the primary input to medical care delivery and innovation the outputs will forever be mixed successes and failures. As true emergency care providers we hope to save those marginal patients that teeter on the edge of what is possible to do and what typically doesn't get done elsewhere. We effectively battle our own system every day and until the system changes our results will be marginal at best.
Keep up the good fight, but keep your focus on the patient. The system is already terminal.

[@Leefatyma]

And I have to explore something

[@tatorihara]

How does this have no comments

[@phoenixytgaming6642]

Ikr, thought there would be more comments. Just us I guess

[@tatorihara]

@@phoenixytgaming6642 well. We might as well have a chat. What games u play?

[@sankarsubba3394]

I guess most people don't really search for this topic.

[@tatorihara]

@@sankarsubba3394 yeah I was doing an essay on it. And you?

[@sankarsubba3394]

@@tatorihara I was just exploring.

[@orishaswishes]

really poor lecture - I mean what suggestions did he have? better communications and triaging. duh. Where is it that triaging isn't standard in the world? Every medical facility I've seen in Latin America - and I've seen a lot - triage. This is old hat. This guy told us nothing new.