Being a doctor is one of the jobs expected to be least at risk from AI replacement. But a new program launched in Utah is raising questions over that assumption. A healthcare startup will begin offering AI examinations and prescriptions to patients without direct human oversight, making Utah the first state to replace a doctor with an AI.
The good news is that the program is currently very limited in its scope. It’s just one year long and only for patients with mild-to-moderate acne.
The process works when a person signs up for Nolla Health’s $4.99-per-month app and uses it to scan their face. After completing a medical history and personal information form, the AI analyzes their skin, identifies the acne problem, rates the skin’s oiliness, and then generates a numerical acne severity score that ranges between clear skin and severe acne, reports Bloomberg.
I have a friend who had developed an expert system for scoring certain lab samples (for cancer). It was a very good system that had few errors and was used for a couple decades. Somebody decided to replace it with an AI system (undefined what sort of AI) and it ended up doing a lot of false negatives, so the lab got sued for missing a lot of cancer diagnoses. Friend’s final task before leaving the company was to update his old model and hire somebody whose primary job was to maintain the old model. On the other hand, a trained monkey (and I’m assuming a LLM) could have done better than the radiologist who looked at my CT scan and said there was no problem, when I could look at it with the basic software they put on your scan DVD and see a fracture across all but a few mm of my sternum. When a different radiologist looked at the scan, he also ID’d several other minor things to follow-up on.