> it's generally known that the person is at the end of their life, yet the medical establishment still tends to focus on treatment rather than actual care
That is exactly what they are trying to address. These doctors are basing their treatment on statistics that don't account for the intricacies of an individual patient's condition. A machine learning model can account for correlations between obscure attributes to predict the success of treatment with much higher confidence than they have now.
The machine learning model can also be as wrong as the doctors at predictions. What happens then? Surely not a headline of "Stanford death model is worthless" right?
Even worse if treatments are forgone or triaged based on output on some incomplete model. Older people already have trouble getting access to life saving surgeries due to mortality statistics. (And no doctor wants to have a dead patient on table, liabilities notwithstanding.)
That is exactly what they are trying to address. These doctors are basing their treatment on statistics that don't account for the intricacies of an individual patient's condition. A machine learning model can account for correlations between obscure attributes to predict the success of treatment with much higher confidence than they have now.