[skohan]

Presumably you would structure such a medical system such that lower level practitioners would know enough to know when to escalate to an MD.

90% of medicine is stuff like people going to the doctor with the flu to get a sick note to stay home from work and instructions to rest and drink fluids. I don't think you need an MD for that.

[forgetfreeman]

You've literally described the current healthcare system in the US. Minute Clinic/NPs/PAs providing front line care. It doesn't appear to be working well based on how our country's healthcare system ranks against other industrialized nations.

[skohan]

I don't live in the US anymore, so it's hard for me to speak to the US healthcare system, but as an outsider it seems to me that the problems with the system stem from the incentive structure, and won't be fixed by any technology.

It seems to me the US healthcare system sits in this weird gap where it's not funded by private individuals, but it's also not publicly funded (excluding medicare/medicade/VA/tricare etc)

So it doesn't benefit from efficiencies of a single-payer system like the UK has, and it doesn't have to obey proper market forces either, since you have a bunch of for-profit entities in the middle, but the costs are obfuscated from the consumer unless you're unlucky enough not to have employer-funded health insurance.

So until you fix those core issues, I don't see how technological advancements are going to have much of an effect either positive or negative.

It's an orthogonal issue.

[forgetfreeman]

I don't disagree on any particular point except the notion that a medical AI represents an advancement. That claim would have to be studied extensively over decades.

[nradov]

We already have that structure to an extent. Much primary care for minor problems is delivered by a PA or NP. They are trained to escalate to an MD when necessary, although due to lack of training sometimes they miss things that an MD would have caught.

[skohan]

> due to lack of training sometimes they miss things that an MD would have caught.

It goes the other way as well. My aunt is an RN and she loves to tell the story about the time that a doctor was in such a rush one time she had to call his attention to the fact that his patient was dead.

[forgetfreeman]

Here's a fun question: would that be due to gross inattention on the doctor's part or gross overwork due to patient/provider ratios being skewed into bizarro world by cost-cutting measures on the part of the hospital?

[skohan]

Yes both of which could be helped by augmenting the healthcare system with AI to relieve practitioners from repetitive, menial tasks

[forgetfreeman]

You mean like how healthcare providers were relieved by advancing legions of PAs and NPs into general medicine? If that approach worked we would have seen improvements to healthcare metrics by now. We haven't.