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Comment by __s | Hacker News Reader

If an AI assisted doctor is 125% more efficient than a non assisted doctor, you only only need 80 doctors where you'd otherwise need 100. That's 20 doctors that have effectively been replaced

Then consider the amount of not-doctor roles in medicine which can be automated/assisted

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Your looking at it wrong.

A doctor's appointment schedule is crazy busy, with "LONG" appointments being under 20min per patient. Imagine a scenario where a doctor is able to spend time with the patient/their medical history etc.

I spend a lot of time going to doctors appointments these days, and a large number of the doctors that I see, now have an assistant/transcriptionist in the room to manage the EMR/charting app, because that enables them to focus on the patient.

Would the doctors take fewer appointments per day and make less money? Or do doctors get paid by the hour?

In Germany they are paid a fixed amount for each patient in a quarter by public insurance.

So they want to minimize the time they spend on each and prefer to give a second appointment months later

Guess I'm not moving to Germany then!

That's definitely one way to look at it. And I hope that's what happens. But is it really wrong to speculate that that isn't going to happen? I think it would be naive to not speculate how we would handle such a situation. Contingency plans are important.

I've never understood this argument. Right now we have decided implicitly as a society we're fine with the current level of care. If we can provide that same level of care cheaper, what makes you think health care providers will decide to pass those savings onto patients in the form of more care for the same price?

I would disagree with this statement. Every year, expectations rise, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to meet these expectations. Furthermore, I think expectations are tempered by the knowledge that staff are over worked and time is limited. It is infeasible to practice medicine the way it us taught in medical school in practice due to time constraints. And like everything else, the work tends to fit the time available.

I hope very much you're right, and that as medicine gets cheaper we get more of it.

Or do you increase throughput by 20% and now more people can get healthcare who otherwise wouldn’t?

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