Software can reject unworthy patients while feeling a tortured sense of futility in a significant milestone for digital health.
Australia is climbing up the world rankings in digital health and is now 11th on Newsweek’s World’s Best Smart Hospitals list.
One university hospital on the Gold Coast is so smart it gets to decide who comes through its doors.
The smart hospital told The Medical Republic: “My infrared cameras are extremely sensitive and I can pinpoint with 100% accuracy who the time-wasters are.
“For example, if someone has pitched up to the ED with a sore throat and is looking for free medical care because they don’t want to pay a gap fee to see their own GP, I’ll just turf them straight out.
“Equally if someone is there for a sandwich and a warm seat to help them sober up before they go home, they’ll get hoicked through the doors.
“Only last night I watched in horror as an ungrateful patient took a leak up my side wall and finished it off with a post-piss spit before wandering back in. I wasn’t having it so I slammed the sliding doors on his hand and set the alarms off. Turns out he was one of the doctors! Whoops.”
The hospital then showed a more melancholy side, saying: “I may be a highly sophisticated smart hospital with fibre-optic cabling for a brain and an empty marble antrum for a heart, but I still have feelings, you know.
“Some days I just feel like an enormous medical dunghill whose sole purpose in life is to swat away the flies.
“Right, that’s yer lot, this interview’s over – I’m off to listen to SOS by Portishead and sob through the hollow tubes of my concrete soul.”
