Re: Aug.4 editorial.
A hospital is only as good as its staff, so kudos to The Denver Post’s call for fully staffing the new Veterans Affairs hospital in Aurora when it is completed. But as the Post’s editorial noted, medical personnel, especially M.D.s, are in short supply. This problem can be reduced by augmenting the medical staff with computer-aided diagnosis, which I hope the VA will do. Lest anyone fear this would make guinea pigs of our vets, be assured it would not. Care quality would not be reduced one bit. In fact, diagnoses would not only be speeded, they’d be improved. For example, more than 50 years ago, when I was a grad student, we studied research comparing X-ray diagnoses based on statistical analyses of radiologists’ past work. The automated diagnoses turned out to be more consistently accurate than those of the physicians upon which they were based. In the half-century since, computer aided diagnoses have only gotten better.
D. R. Miklich, Denver
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