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Comment by pezezin | Hacker News Reader

My dad is a retired nurse. Most of his work was giving shots, treating wounds, extracting blood, putting IV catheters, etc. In other words, physical tasks. How is an "AI agent" or LLM going to take care of that?

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When I watch medical professionals at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through notes, talking to others or waiting for results from some lab down the hall. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.

I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in the hospital tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a public health system.

This was also a public health system (Spain), but I guess it might depend on the country.

Now that you mentions labs, he spent the last 10 years of his career (maybe more, I don't remember clearly) working at a food analysis lab and there was a lot of waiting for results there, but it is what it is, microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster.

> microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster

Rate limited by biology. Love that.

> no LLM in the world can make them go faster

You mean the microbes have to double n-times (to get sufficient numbers of microbes) before tests can be run on them.

But maybe the LLMs figure out a way to run those tests on microbes that have only doubled 0.1(n-times).

You could then think of the LLMs as being a more honest version of Elizabeth Holmes.

If I remember correctly, the procedure was to prepare a food sample, put it in a temperature-controlled environment for 24 hours, and next day see if something grew there or not. If it did, the food was contaminated.

You could try shortening the time to 6 or 12 hours, but then

1) if something grew then the food was contaminated, but if it didn't, how can you be sure it is good or you just didn't wait enough? You would get a lot of false negatives.

2) the lab followed a normal 8 hours a day schedule, so nobody would be there to analize the results. You would not gain anything.

When I watch software developers at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through stackoverflow, zoom chat to others or waiting for results from a github CI run. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.

I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in technology tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a publicly traded company.

Obviously not an LLM, but AI models + robotics are likely to automate many healthcare tasks in the long term and are already beginning to automate tasks like blood draws.

  The Aletta autonomously handles each step of the blood draw, while a trained phlebotomist initiates each session and remains available to respond to any issues throughout. The device guides the patient to position their arm, after which the patient or supervisor presses a button to start the blood draw. The Aletta then uses near-infrared light and Doppler ultrasound to locate a suitable vein and tell it apart from arteries. If no appropriate vein is found, the device will not attempt the procedure.

  Once a vein is identified, the Aletta proceeds through the remaining steps on its own: applying a tourniquet, preparing the skin, inserting and disposing of the needle, changing collection tubes and placing a bandage. The supervising phlebotomist confirms that collection tubes are filled in the correct order and verifies that all tubes are adequately full following the procedure.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-auth...

these days, i think most tasks come with significant administrative overhead as insurance companies want everything documented (and hospitals need to itemize everything to bill it).

i looked at very similar data as anthropic (was a bit amusing to look at these side by side) with physical tasks being part of the equation much more prominently (across all jobs).

if you're interested: https://largelabormodel.com/mirror?job=2221

Not every country is like the US. My country has a public healthcare system; I never needed private insurance and never had to pay for a visit to the doctor.

Ironically, given the reputation of high costs and private care, that is how it is too in the US. It is just that you have to be broke, unemployed, or retired to be covered by the public single payer system. The clinic still needs to document what was done to get reimbursed by Medicaid.

i grew up between germany and the US — having dealt with the public insurance system in germany, it's not (much) less admin-intensive than the US. my mom works in the public healthcare system in germany and has to fill out heaps of paperwork.

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