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This is the issue that gives me pause with medical education questions. What proportion of procedures are fairly trivial and easily enough handled by a mid-level, and furthermore what proportion of high complexity procedures are creating equivalent value to their cost.
It looks to me that getting population life expectancy up to the mid 70s is fairly trivial for modernized economies. I'd imagine a lot of that is picking the proverbial low-hanging fruit of basic sanitization, improving maternal health etcetera. On top of that, a bunch of public health considerations like diet and general longevity seem to be worth half a decade or so. How much is endless battling over medical funding actually doing
Unrelated bit first - great user name.
So the issue is that the triage is the work for a lot of medicine. That's basically a vast majority of what emergency medicine is for.
For a simple example (in the sense that triage nursing programs and AI can handle this one):
Someone comes in with chest pain. Do you give them some tums or give them a hundred plus thousand dollar cardiac work-up? Do they get better in three seconds or die.
Knowing to ask things like "hey did you just have a 3 pounds of spaghetti with red sauce?" lets you figure it out.
A more complicated question might be something like "this person fell, do you scan their head before sending them home?" which has a lot of research, debate, and need for asking patients (who may be unreliable) very specific questions.
Once you've triaged and diagnosed them things get simpler, but at that point to a large extent the work is already done.
Also - Americans need someone to sue.
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