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by jonas21 175 days ago
An alternative business model is that you, or more likely your insurance, pays $20/mo for unlimited access to a medical agent, built on top of an LLM, that can answer your questions. This is good for everyone -- the patient gets answers without waiting, the insurer gets cost savings, doctors have a less hectic schedule and get to spend more time on the interesting cases, and the company providing the service gets paid for doing a good job -- and would have a strong incentive to drive hallucination rate down to zero (or at least lower than the average physician's).
3 comments
TheOtherHobbes 175 days ago
The medical industry relies on scarcity and it's also heavily regulated, with expensive liability insurance, strong privacy rules, and a parallel subculture of fierce negligence lawyers who chase payouts very aggressively.

There is zero chance LLMs will just stroll into this space with "Kinda sorta mostly right" answers, even with external verification.

Doctors will absolutely resist this, because it means the impending end of their careers. Insurers don't care about cost savings because insurers and care providers are often the same company.

Of course true AGI will eventually - probably quite soon - become better at doctoring than many doctors are.

But that doesn't mean the tech will be rolled out to the public without a lot of drama, friction, mistakes, deaths, and traumatic change.

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adriand 175 days ago
This is a great idea and insurance companies as the customer is brilliant. I could see this extend to prescribing as well. There are huge numbers of people that would benefit from more readily prescribed drugs like GLP-1s, and these have large portential to decrease chronic disease.
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girvo 175 days ago
> I could see this extend to prescribing as well.

The western world is already solving this, but not through letting LLMs prescribe (because that's a non-starter for liability reasons).

Instead, nurses and allied health professionals are getting prescribing rights in their fields (under doctors, but still it scales much better).

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corndoge 175 days ago
https://hippocraticai.com/
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