Honestly, this is going to be huge for healthcare. There's an incredible amount of waste due to incumbent tech making interoperability difficult.
I’ve implemented quite a few RPA apps and the struggle is the request/response turn around time for realtime transactions. For batch data extract or input, RPA is great since there’s no expectation of process duration. However, when a client requests data in realtime that can only be retrieved from an app using RPA, the response time is abysmal. Just picture it - Start the app, log into the app if it requires authentication (hope that the authentication's MFA is email based rather than token based, and then access the mailbox using an in-place configuration with MS Graph/Google Workspace/etc), navigate to the app’s view that has the data or worse, bring up a search interface since the exact data isn’t known and try and find the requested data. So brittle...
CTO of healthcare org here.
I just put a hold on a new RPA project to keep an eye on this and see how it develops.
According to their docs, Anthropic will sign a BAA.
Sometimes, the AI is more accurate or safer than humans, but it still reads better to say "we always have humans in the loop". In those cases, we reap the benefits of both: Use the AI for safety, but still have a human fallback.
We haven't deployed a model like this, it's new.
I've done a ton of various RPAs over the years, using all the normal techniques, and they're always brittle and sensitive to minor updates.
For this, I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. I want to see and test how well it performs in the real world before I deploy it, and wait for it to come out of beta so Anthropic will sign a BAA.
The demo is impressive enough that I want to give the tech a chance to mature before my team and I invest a ton of time into a more traditional RPA.
At a minimum, if we do end up using it, we'll have solid guard rails in place - it'll run on an isolated VM, all of its user access will be restricted to "read only" for external systems, and any content that comes from it will go through review by our nurses.
I don't think this is going to work in that industry until local models get good enough to do it, and small enoguh to be affordable to hospitals.
Similarly I expect that once processing/searching laws/legal records becomes easy through LLMs, we'll compensate by having orders of magnitude more laws, perhaps themselves generated in part by LLMs.
So the solution to that is to add another layer of complex AI tech on top of it?
In my case I have a bunch of nurses that waste a huge amount of time dealing with clerical work and tech hoops, rather than operating at the top of their license.
Traditional RPAs are tough when you're dealing with VPNs, 2fa, remote desktop (in multiple ways), a variety of EHRs and scraping clinical documentation from poorly structured clinical notes or PDFs.
This technology looks like it could be a game changer for our organization.
So maybe like an automated ubikey that you can opt in to a nearby computer to have all the access. Especially if working from home, you can set it at a state where if you are in 15m radius of your laptop it is able to sign all access.
Because right now, considering amount of tools and everything I use and with single sign on, VPN, Okta, etc, and how slow they seem to be, it's extremely frustrating process constantly logging in to everywhere, and it's almost like it makes me procrastinate my work, because I can't be bothered. Everything about those weird little things is absolutely terrible experience, including things like cookie banners as well.
And it is ridiculous, because I'm working from home, but frustratingly high amount of time is spent on this bs.
A bluetooth wearable or similar to prove that I'm nearby essentially, to me that seems like it could alleviate a lot of safety concerns, while providing amazing dev/ux.
The main attack vector would then probably be some man-in-the-middle intercepting the signal from your wearable, which leads me to wonder whether you could protect yourself by having the responses valid for only an extremely short duration, e.g. ~1ms, such that there's no way for an attacker to do anything with the token unless they gain control over compute inside your house.
I'd bet that until we get the risks whittled down enough for larger organizations to adopt this on a wide scale, the biggest user group for AI automation tools will be at the level of individual workers who are eager to streamline their own tasks and aren't paid enough to care about those same risks.