Today’s blog post topic falls into the category of “Do I really want to know?” When I saw the headline, “AI death calculator can predict when you’ll die… with eerie accuracy” my first thought was to wonder if I should take the test or not. This tool, called Life2vec, promised an accuracy rate of 78% and if you’re a gambler, those seemed like pretty good odds. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make a decision since the data was only accurate for people in Denmark and it’s not yet available to the general public. However, it was another headline about something available indeed to the public, “The map of the worst hospitals in France” that got my attention.

Although the newspaper that I was reading chose an eye grabbing interpretation of the data, the article went on to explain that thanks to a service called QualiScope it was possible to find the best hospital or clinique in your region. For 20 years the French health regulator Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) has been monitoring the quality and safety of health facilities, both public and private, across the country. Historically the HAS has examined factors including care coordination, risk prevention, and pain management while they recently incorporated patient feedback to give a more complete picture.

The most recent information that I saw said that 85% of the facilities visited provided at least a satisfactory level of patient care while 13% were given a conditional certification with a requirement for rapid improvement. The remaining 3% (rounded percentage) were not certified because of “insufficient quality of care” and given an action plan that must be implemented by the next inspection within 12 to 24 months.

Luckily neither Bill nor I have had much reason to visit the hospital or in our case the considerably closer clinique that we can walk to in 15 minutes. Broadly speaking, a clinique is a privately funded hospital with independent practitioners who may (or not) charge more than the salaried employees of the state funded hospital. I can happily say that a check of both of these facilities on QualiScope showed that they are certified. If you would like to investigate a medical establishment near you, here’s the link: https://www.has-sante.fr/jcms/c_1725555/fr/qualiscope-qualite-des-hopitaux-et-des-cliniques

The article that I read about the death calculator concluded with this creepy statement: So far, Life2vec has been tested on a group of individuals between the ages of 35 and 65 in Denmark, half of whom have died. Fifty percent of those tested have died since taking the test? No thanks, I’ll just gratefully go on living one day at a time.

Photo notes: All images come from the Haute Autorité de Santé. The caption in the first paragraph photo could be translated as, “We don’t form an opinion on a hospital like we do on a book.”