Everyone worries about AI replacing doctors. After 24 hours in the hands of the NHS, I think they’re looking in the wrong direction.
GP, A&E, then other parts of the hospital. Every shift, a new doctor. Every new doctor, the same questions. The same story, retold from the top. Every single one of them then took a picture of my rash with their phone.
The first GP I saw actually had an AI assistant. It recorded our conversation and drafted a letter, which he printed on that grey recyclable paper the NHS uses for everything and which absolutely no one in the chain that followed ever read.
Meanwhile, I had Claude in my pocket. It knew my whole story from the first symptom. It could interpret the blood results before the doctor did, and flag a couple of things worth asking about. By the third doctor, I was essentially a transcription layer between Claude and the NHS.
My whole situation could have easily be baked into a Claude skill, easy to interpret by any LLM based diagnostic software.
I’m not going to argue AI should replace doctors. Mine were careful, kind, and correct. But AI replacing the patient? That part is ready now. The doctors get a well-organised history, an accurate timeline, current medications, no retelling. The patient gets to rest.
The hard part in medicine is context. The context of the whole field is enormous and probably beyond what current AI can carry reliably. But the context of one specific patient, with one specific problem, unfolding over a few days? That’s hard, but achievable with today’s tech. Mine was, all things considered, a relatively simple case. Cases at this level of complexity still make up the bulk of what the system handles every day.
Which brings me to the bigger point. The waste I watched from the inside over 24 hours was remarkable: the same story told six times, the same photo taken six times, the same pieces of information gathered again and again because no one had time to read what the previous shift had written. If we can shift even part of that burden onto the patient’s side, with the patient’s own AI carrying their story cleanly from one clinician to the next, it starts to look like a real contribution to the sustainability problem that every public health system is wrestling with.
And once we have that down, the Doc AI will get much better too.
Not today. Tomorrow for sure.