but a tool that takes away the toil of monitoring

Ok, so Lifelabs posts patient lab results online for them to see. They CLEARLY mark "high" and "low" for items that are out of range (of the norm).

A nurse would quite literally crosscheck 50 blood markers in a matter of seconds, without the need for expensive AI or at a risk of them losing their job/qualifications.

In this specific case, the fever + high WBC would be more than enough for a nurse to know that something was up. It makes me think that adding AI just adds another step.

I'm not saying that the application of AI to detect abnormalities is wasteful, but I do think it's unnecessary and possibly a negative in the context of basic lab work.

I think it can be useful in predicting a diagnosis months/years before a doctor would be able to, since it can analyze data and look for patterns across millions of cases. This would be especially useful in rare diseases, or even something like dementia.

But using it to tell a nurse or doctor that their patient's white blood counts are "really, really high" after being bitten by an animal is borderline insulting to healthcare professionals.

Black people are more likely to die (due to systemic racism), so AI says: save the white person.

We saw this a lot at the height of the pandemic, which is why many nurses argued that the best triage method was random selection.

As always the problem isn't inherently that AI exists. The problem is that humans trust its output and use that to make decisions (and the laws still allow them to do it in many jurisdictions).