“You can’t just summon doctors and nurses from thin air.”

Briefly listened in to an interesting conversation on the local radio, about the shortage of doctors and nurses which plagues many communities in rural BC. Some emergency rooms have frequent temporary closures, and some towns or regions have lost their only maternity clinics, resulting in patient well-being suffering. This email’s title is a quote from the interviewee, referring to the extensive training a healthcare practitioner must undergo, to explain why the shortage persists despite recent funding increases.

Well, it’s true that you can’t make new doctors and nurses out of thin air. But here’s a trick that’s just as good. Let’s work with simplified numbers to illustrate, and keep in mind that there’s more nuance for, say, very remote rural communities. Anyway, here’s how it works:

• Imagine that a doctor does 50% of “real” doctor work and 50% administrative overhead.

• Magically take those 50% of overhead away.

• You’ve now doubled the doctoring work that this doctor performs.

• That doctor’s output is therefore equivalent to that of two doctors under the old, admin-heavy, system.

And just like that, you’ve created a doctor out of thin air.

Whether these exact numbers are correct isn’t the point; the point is that this way of thinking gives us a powerful way to address a shortage: Not by increasing supply, but by optimizing our use of the existing supply. And I’m convinced AI has a role to play in this.