The $4 complete medical review and second opinion from Claude

A friend’s son has been working on a systematic approach that takes a “computer-readable export” from Epic, the medical record behemoth, and prepare it for analysis by Claude. He uses VS Code with the LLM plugged in. As prep, he has the AI genius convert all of the Epic data into JSON format and then he works for 10-20 minutes on refining prompts to get a good summary. Claude might chew for an hour on its own to produce the final PDF.

What does it cost to have a complex patient’s history analyzed? One example has years of tests, multiple diagnoses, and a record totally 185 MB. Claude Code Fable 5.1 (max) prepared a 18-page summary of tests, conditions, and diagnoses for less than $4. This include graphs, charts, and suggested follow-up tests. Here’s an example excerpt (not going to do too much in order to preserve patient privacy).

The caption reveals the tragic failure of the American health care system: “Eight specialties across two hospital systems are now involved, and none of them owns the whole picture.” Each specialist is great if the patient’s condition is obviously related to his or her specialty, but the patient is in a world of trouble if the symptoms don’t fit neatly into one of our system’s silos. And, perhaps with Mayo Clinic, Kaiser, and Cleveland Clinic as partial exceptions, collaboration among specialists is rare. For one thing, it is challenging to bill an insurance company for “all-hands meeting among specialists without the patient in the office or hospital.” Gemini:

When broken down by an hourly revenue metric, peer-reviewed medical data shows that insurance networks and Medicare historically reimburse physicians 3 to 5 times more per hour for standard procedural work than they do for cognitive work of identical length.

So… assuming that the specialists leave some decent notes in Epic, the all-hands meeting can happen inside the brain of an LLM and at a retail cost of around $4. (In this case, 4% of a monthly quota that cost $100/month was used.)

[Let’s also keep in mind that whatever capability Claude Fable 5.1 has right now for $4 should cost less than $1 in a year. On the other hand, a desktop or laptop PC might cost $50,000 by then, due to competition from data centers for components, so try not to spill any water on your home machine!]

Note that it is possible that ChatGPT Health, a standard feature of the system, might be able to do all of this even more conveniently. You can simply connect it to most hospitals’ EMRs and to various labs, etc. Then ask questions whenever you want that will be based on everything that it has pulled from these sources. I was interested in what the kid did with Claude because it gives us the current full retail price, not hidden as it might be if ChatGPT were used as part of a subscription.