Comment by zoe_dk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zoe_dk | Hacker News Reader

I build AI tools to automate Nursing tasks in Aged Care.

I'm an Aged Care nurse of 13 years, taught myself to code 5 years ago and am obsessed about automating nursing tasks(i.e auditing, funding, quality) because the volume of admin work that is required by Nurses is absurd and the industry is very far behind and very resistant to: change, spending money and technology in general.

I have been shouting into an empty void the last 3 years but that is okay, i am patient.

I mostly focus on standalone, local AI tools that do a task and are open ended(manual file upload) to suit the 20 million different software in aged care. Keep it all as simple as possible and minimal hurdles.

Generally using llama.cpp, Qwen3, python and then wrapping in some sort of ugly GUI or more recently- AutoHotKey. The nurses feel powerful pressing a few buttons with ahk and watching work be done. (Avoids command line, avoids me being paralyzed by front end stuff).

I don't know why i am sharing this as i am way out of my depth here but there you go. If anyone else is in the Aged Care space, give me a shout. *edit because i can't format new lines or spell.

Don’t downplay your position. You might be behind in technical knowledge compared to people in this community but you are in an excellent plance otherwise:

- You have identified a real life problem.

- You are a domain expert.

- You can iterate and test your solutions quickly in a real world environment.

- you are making sane technical choices: keep it simple, use what your user want, use what works.

- you are patient.

- most importantly, your motivation is deeply rooted in yourself.

I share your frustration with change resistance and insane level of complexity in the health care industry, it’s not just nursing. But if you can show people that you are improving their life, they won’t look back. Proof by the demo is what works.

Keep up the good work, keep being patient and change will happen.

May I ask what kind of tasks these are specifically? Is it mostly data entry, management and reporting? Or are you interfacing with devices?

This sounds amazing. I sent you a connection request on LinkedIn. I've spent a decade writing apps now and happy to chat about code and product-related things.

Instead of AHK, look into RPA tooling.

That's honestly amazing, one of the biggest you may face is some big-medtech company copying your approach, scaling it into a shitty SaaS much quicker and selling it better because they have connections to the greasy higher ups that own the aged care companies.

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