> It's almost as if you'd want to not feed what the patient says directly to an LLM.
> A non-trivial part of what doctors do is charting - where they strip out all the unimportant stuff you tell them unrelated to what they're currently trying to diagnose / treat, so that there's a clear and concise record.
I think the hard part of medicine -- the part that requires years of school and more years of practical experience -- is figuring out which observations are likely to be relevant, which aren't, and what they all might mean. Maybe it's useful to have a tool that can aid in navigating the differential diagnosis decision tree but if it requires that a person has already distilled the data down to what's relevant, that seems like the relatively easy part?
By the way, the show The Pitt currently on Max touches on some of this stuff with a great deal of accuracy (I'm told) and equal amounts of empathy. It's quite good.
Yes - theoretically, some form of ML/AI should be very good at charting the relevant parts, prompting the doctor for follow-up questions & tests that would be good to know to rule out certain conditions.
The harder problem would be getting the actual diagnosis right, not filtering out irrelevant details.
But it will be an important step if you're using an LLM for the diagnosis.