What they do in India to make medical care available to the very poor without cutting quality of care is called *task-shifting*.
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You take the *simplest* tasks which are usually done by skilled experts (doctors & nurses) and delegate them to non-credentialed workers or volunteers who go through a brief training course.
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This increases the risk of those tasks being done wrong, but *carefully*, starting by delegating the lowest-risk, least-technical tasks first.
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US hospitals are already used to triage: treating urgent, fixable cases ahead in line of mild and hopeless cases. Task-shifting is triage for tasks.
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Medically skilled personnel are a scarce resource in a crisis like COVID19; the smart thing to do is to reserve them for those tasks that are most difficult to learn to perform safely.
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When people have life-threatening cases of COVID19, the treatments they need are the *hardest* to task-shift to the untrained. Very invasive, very easy to accidentally kill someone by screwing up. It might be easier to scale up routine care instead.
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What I’ve read from retrospectives of natural disasters and other emergencies is that there’s usually no shortage of volunteers and donations. People are actually very generous in a crisis. The bottleneck is more often getting those volunteers trained and organized.
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Top priority is getting someone with experience task-shifting hospitals (perhaps in poor countries) to give guidance on how rich countries with overwhelmed medical systems can do something similar.
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if we know we're going to need ICU capacity for one very specific kind of intensive-care situation (the COVID19 respiratory one) I wonder how much faster we could scale up a sort of one-trick-pony ICU capacity to deal with just that. answer maybe "not much" or "a lot"
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Maybe one place where ML could help (but would never get regulatory approval in time) is predictive analytics on which patients are likely to crash soon (and rough time frame) along with a queueing algorithm of sorts to help minimize situations with urgent tasks>ppl to do them.
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