Fantastic. An additional way by which someone looking for help or support from a human can be denied that help and have their needs offloaded to a technology that probably can’t help them.
Here’s how I see this playing out: practices start to use LLMs to answer patient queries to save money. People realize their queries aren’t actually being answered fully (or at all?) and stop contacting their doctors at all. Practices save money and patients get worse outcomes. Exactly as we’ve seen in customer service over the years - talking to a human is nearly impossible.
An alternate possibility is the LLM gives such bad advice that it causes irreparable harm to a patient and nobody can be held liable because the doctor didn’t issue the advice and neither did the company which produced the LLM.
The universe where an LLM used in this situation does anything positive for the patient is vanishingly small. But I’m sure providers and practices will love it, since it effectively will allow them to not do part of their job and increase margins respectively.
Here’s how I see this playing out: practices start to use LLMs to answer patient queries to save money. People realize their queries aren’t actually being answered fully (or at all?) and stop contacting their doctors at all. Practices save money and patients get worse outcomes. Exactly as we’ve seen in customer service over the years - talking to a human is nearly impossible.
An alternate possibility is the LLM gives such bad advice that it causes irreparable harm to a patient and nobody can be held liable because the doctor didn’t issue the advice and neither did the company which produced the LLM.
The universe where an LLM used in this situation does anything positive for the patient is vanishingly small. But I’m sure providers and practices will love it, since it effectively will allow them to not do part of their job and increase margins respectively.