Calling Dr. Welby/Rev II

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Back in 2012, a blurb posted in BRT titled Healthcare - Days of Future Past detailed the coming revolution in medical with AI and Lab on a chip tech (Not Theranos ) capable of upending an inefficient for profit business to the max. It's not here yet but it will be as the current state of HC in America is not sustainable in any way, shape or fashion

Some of the efficiencies gained as per the article will include:

• Watson goes into smart phones and becomes friendly Dr. Welby, available 24/7 in the privacy of your own home. Implications for the future of doctors cannot be underestimated when...
• Lab on a Chip gets real and can be bought at the local drug store complete with wireless connectivity to a smartphone or computer with connects to, you guessed it, Watson, the friendly digital doc who's analysis of one's drop of blood placed into the aforementioned Lab on A Chip is assessed with lab results sent back to you within minutes telling you why you are feeling the way you do without delay and without exorbitant costs, which means
• The number of doctors needed to do baseline healthcare plummets
• The cost of doing lab analysis of one's blood plummets
• The cost of processing claims plummets while
• The number of nurse practitioners rises to do the basics, i.e.flu shots, minor injuries etc., etc.
• The question of drug and hospital costs will become the central issue along with insurance premiums as tech will have drastically lowered the expense of healthcare via the hardware/software environment described above.  
• The same push of tech will impact administrative inefficiencies as well because technology will force the industry to become more transparent, competitive and web savvy regarding doctor, drug, hospital/MRI/Xray and insurance costs because people will demand it just as they demanded the same transparency when looking to buy anything else that's available on line whether it be books, computers or software.
• In 2023, as stated before, lab on a chip is not here yet but it will be. It's just a matter of time.

Hermes hastens bearing his kerukeion, 

on an Attic lekythos, c. 475 BC, attributed to the Tithonos Painter

In 2023 ... AI gets real.

But in recent months Tolchin has begun seeing patients who are using a new, far more powerful tool for self-diagnosis: artificial intelligence chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the latest version of Microsoft’s search engine Bing (which is based on OpenAI’s software) and Google’s Med-PaLM. Trained on text across the Internet, these large language models (LLMs) predict the next word in a sequence to answer questions in a humanlike style. Faced with a critical shortage of health care workers, researchers and medical professionals hope that bots can step in to help answer people’s questions. Initial tests by researchers suggest these AI programs are far more accurate than a Google search. Some researchers predict that within the year, a major medical center will announce a collaboration using LLM chatbots to interact with patients and diagnose disease.

ChatGPT was only released last November, but Tolchin says at least two patients have already told him they used it to self-diagnose symptoms or to look up side effects of medication. The answers were reasonable, he says. “It’s very impressive, very encouraging in terms of future potential,” he adds.

And this ... a long term approach to medical AI begins.

Google is taking a different approach with its LLM chatbot Med-PaLM, which pulls from a massive data set of real questions and answers from patients and providers, as well as medical licensing exams, stored in various databases. When researchers at Google tested Med-PaLM’s performance on different “axes,” including alignment with medical consensus, completeness and possibility of harm, in a preprint study, its answers aligned with medical and scientific consensus 92.6 percent of the time. Human clinicians scored 92.9 percent overall. Chatbot answers were more likely to have missing content than human answers were, but the answers were slightly less likely to harm users’ physical or mental health.

Carling Dr. Welby/Rev II applies does it not?