I’m a physician, medical oncologist and researcher with a previous background in software engineering. I happen to hear your points often and always reply the same way: if it is that easy and cost-saving, why don’t you build a tool that does this? The healthcare market is huge, the knowledge basis is more or less the same for all countries and almost all information is available online for free. There is a plethora of startups developing symptom checkers, supportive tools, clinical decision support systems and much more.
I’m testing a lot of these systems and helping companies to realize their wishes, still in my opinion those systems are ages from what doctors are able to do.
The argument has been made before, that physicians make up only a fraction of the total cost of healthcare. There is plenty of data supporting the fact that physicians even save money for healthcare systems and serve to avoid unnecessary, expensive and possibly harmful diagnostics.
So if you are able to develop a tool that is competent enough to talk to you for 2 minutes, perform 20 secs of auscultation and correctly diagnose and treat your common cold while excluding signs of potential worse underlying conditions, you will make millions of dollars.
But because the problem of turning all the available medical literature into data that can be acted upon, bridging the gap between a device and a human being with more than cameras and voice recognition whilst being ridiculously cheap and easy to maintain I’m quite confident even my grandchildren can be doctors (if they want to) and almost all of their responsibilities will still be performed by them.
I assume you are a healthy human being and luckily you weren’t forced to consult doctors for severe healthcare problems, but I assure you, once you happen to touch problems we assume to be even slightly more complex than the healthy population has to deal with, you will be happy that a human doctor is making the decisions, answers your questions, performs diagnostic tests and treatments on you and talks to your relatives. And if your are able to develop a tool that frees me from even 50% of the administrative bulls… I have to deal with, I will more than happily buy it.
TLDR: medical problems are more complex and inaccessible by non-human objects than it is commonly acknowledged by the layman. If you have a credible solution to a fraction of the problems we face and are able to sell it, you will be a millionaire.