Building an Agentic AI System at Doctolib | Hacker News Reader

Building an Agentic AI System at Doctolib

medium.com

11 pointsmalkins9 comments

I am probably the cynical here but when I read in the very first paragraph stuff like "the system we dream of" and "delighting the health professionals" I call it bullshit and move over. I don't know if it's AI generated bullshit or regular marketing bullshit (which trained the AI anyway) but I also don't care, because I'm sure if they actually had real stuff to show they wouldn't need that bullshit.

They're absolutely not going to solve or improve anything at all, doctors are already over booked (in fr/de), if anything doctolib adds to the problem.

We're slowly arriving to the tipping point, too many people, not enough doctors, people going to the doctor for ridiculous problems because "it's free" (plot twist it isn't, it's paid with your/our taxes), &c.

Now honestly I prefer people going to doctors for ridiculous problems, than having a gatekeeping which keeps real problems unsolved. So the real problem would be then: how to handle better the "ridiculous problems" and keep doctors busy with the real ones? I don't see that one being addressed by agents - another example of tech solving the wrong problem indeed.

Edit: now maybe this would be a good startup idea.

Given that it's a French company I can almost guarantee that it was written/translated using an LLM.

Doctolib is a doctor appointments scheduling system widely used throughout Germany.

So take that they are "transforming how health professionals and patients interact with technology" with a massive grain of salt, even if all germany used it every single day you could run the entire operation on a medium ec2 instance with a single RDS instance.

Bleeding edge stuff.

The tl;dr here is they also don't want to have to pay to outsource their support staff, so they're paying openai or someone else instead.

So amaze. Much wow.

Doctolib is present in France too, I thought it is DocCheck in Germany?

> The tl;dr here is they also don't want to have to pay to outsource their support staff, so they're paying openai or someone else instead.

I don't think that's the right lens to view this in. Germany in particular is a very difficult market to provide customer service in, given that German-language skills outside of the high-wage DACH region is non-existent, when you compare it to the English speaking market that often relies on the acceptably-accented Phillipine region. If you want to provide customer service in Germany, it's not simply that firms aren't willing to pay enough to hire customer support staff, it's that the pool of people who could work in this field just don't exist in large enough numbers.

By introducing agentic AI to solve some number of support questions you offer patients service that you just otherwise simply couldn't.

TL;DR: It's a chatbot.

It's a sad state of affairs that this seems to be all that the industry rose up to.

The real innovation should have been: "Now you can get a prediagnostic / prescription for most common issues directly online 24/7". Because a chatbot to add a booking to a calendar when you could just press "+" button is not an improvement.

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