I'd be interested to hear what you find out. I have a buddy who basically lost his police force job because of a mis-read EKG, which caused him to be taken off of his ADHD meds, which doctors wouldn't re-prescribe to him, because they thought he was an addict trying to score. He has a real case of ADHD. He wound up losing his job and his condo-- everything, basically.
In the abstract, I agree -- there are many situations where low res is better than none.
But given the amount of interpretation and reading (it truly is an art, not a science) that goes into reading an EKG and more importantly, a tumor x-ray, I think in this situation, low res is worse than none, because it's worthless (you can't tell anything from it) and it still cost you something.
If you do try to do a cancer diagnosis on a poor x-ray, you are basing cancer treatment on the flip of a coin.
no cancer? Well you might fill them up with expensive chemotherapy, which itself is carcinogenic. Actually has cancer? Well, you've just set them loose with an organic time bomb in their system.
I think one of the problems of "but this is just a small engineering project" is precision, reliability, quality-- whatever you want to call it.
There is interpretation that goes into reading an EKG, an xray, lab results. If there's any unreliability whatsoever, that will impact treatment and outcomes.
If there's any unreliability in your EKG readout, that's can be the different between diagnosing a minor heart attack versus chest pain.
The same goes for diagnosing a cancerous tumor from a benign one. There's already ambiguity and interpretation; if there's any imprecision in the measuring device, that's going to lead to bad outcomes-- both overtreatment and undertreatment.
But I digress...